One of the most tragic things I’ve ever witnessed happened one Spring day in 1992 on the afternoon school bus ride home. No one will remember this event, save me and maybe Mark Jenkins, if he hasn’t blocked it out from his memory.
In 1989, Mark was 13 years old. An unfortunately awkward physical specimen during his early teenage years, he was short, very tan, about thirty pounds overweight, and a late arrival at puberty. When I last saw him, his voice still squeaked on occasion, and he had that obnoxious know-it-all attitude often present in geeky teenagers. He was not well-liked by anyone on our bus, which is partly my fault. Let me explain.
Mark and I had been friends since he moved into his house in about 1984. We lived on the shores of Lake Allatoona in Cherokee County, Georgia. My father had built our house on property my family bought at an Army Corps of Engineers auction in the 1950’s when the reservoir was being constructed. When we moved into the house permanently in 1982, there were only five houses on all of Galt’s Road; only two of those houses were occupied year round. I was a kid without other kids to play with, so when Mark moved into a house up the hill from me on Galt’s Ferry Landing Road, even though he was three years younger than me, my prayers had been answered.
But, our friendship wasn’t born out of similarities in personality or interests; it was one of circumstance and necessity. There was no one else to play with. If we didn’t do stuff together, I was just left to my imagination, which usually involved positioning my Star Wars men in endless battlefield scenarios on a clay embankment in our yard. The dirt clods and rocks provided a craggy landscape in which my Imperial Forces could wait to ambush the rebel scum seeking to defeat Emperor Palpatine. But, even Star Wars got boring, so Mark was great to have around.
However, Mark was a stubborn kid. He was opinionated, had to be in charge, and would frequently, and literally, take his ball and go home if we didn’t do what he wanted. We both realized the value in playing together, but often we would get sick of each other. As the years went by we moved from Star Wars to G.I. Joe toys. He and I would swim and fish in the lake from early morning until sundown. When I got a BB gun, he got one too, and we would exhaust our supplies of BBs shooting at beer cans we filled with water to get a bigger explosion when we got a hit. When we discovered some Civil War era trenches and foxholes in the woods on a ridge above the lake, we would re-enact the Battle of Allatoona Gap and pretend that we were resisting the Yankee invaders.[1]
Mark’s parents were like most people’s parents in Cherokee County, Georgia in the 1980’s: working class, smokers, and strict disciplinarians. Mark was 10 in 1984, a full six years younger than his next oldest sibling, Matt. Matt drove a 1975 Camaro that he was chronically “fixing up,” which, in the local parlance meant that he had painted it with primer when he bought it, and it would remain primer colored until the engine blew or he crashed it. Matt dipped Skoal, had a bright red mullet, was pure muscle, wore a gold chain tight around his enormously Adam’s-appled throat, and was the epitome of redneck cool at the time. He had a box of condoms in his nightstand drawer, and when Mark’s parents would go out of town, he had girls over and would actually get to use the condoms. He was nothing like Mark, and Matt couldn’t stand his little brother being around, so he picked on him and embarrassed him in front of his girlfriends. His emotional abuse of his brother was pretty mean. One time he got one of his girlfriends (there were many), to go into Mark’s bedroom and act like she wanted to make out with Mark. At that age, the very entry of a girl into your bedroom would cause an erection, so when she sat down his bed and asked him to kiss her, he immediately became aroused. Knowing what was going on, Matt would then barge into the room and get mad at Mark and berate him for “trying to steal his woman.” One particularly cruel time, Matt and his buddy Joey Lafasoe (Luh-FAH-sow) came home after school with their girlfriends before Mr. & Mrs. Jenkins got home from work. They sat in the recliners, and had their girlfriends grind against their jocks and simulate sex in front of Mark. As Mark stared wild-eyed at this real-life porn film, Matt yelled at him “What the *&^% are you looking at?” and then jumped up, grabbed him, pulled his pants down, and spanked his bare butt in front of everyone while the girls sexually humiliated him for his small early-pubescent penis.
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Mark never had it easy. His parents never believed his side of the story. The punishments he received for minor offenses were draconian. He always reeked of cigarette smoke because his parents chain-smoked (and I do mean chain-smoked). When you walked down the road, you could smell the cigarette smoke coming from Mark’s house. I can still see his mom making us a pitcher of Grime-flavored Kool Aid (Grape + Lime) in a dark-brown Rubbermaid plastic pitcher with a cigarette bobbing up and down between her lips as she lectured us about “taking your damned shoes off (cough) when you come inside (cough, cough).”
He wasn’t very smart. He’d ask me questions that a kid his age should’ve known; he sucked at math, spelling, and reading. We’d try to read comic books, and he had to sound out words like “weapon.” He really loved Ozzie Osborne, Black Sabbath, Motley Crue, and Dokken. His parents didn’t have much money, so he got lots of hand-me-downs from Matt. Mark preferred black, and would often wear the same clothes to school on back-to-back days, since his parents were gone to work before the sun even came up. When we were at elementary school, it seemed like I was the only person who liked Mark.
In the Fall of 1988, I started high school, made the football team, and found some new friends. I got involved in rec-league baseball, and suddenly I was in with a new crowd, and no longer had the time to hang out and play with Mark. Our friendship slowly waned. In the Summers, I either went to work with my Dad or hung out with my friends at their houses; I spent the entire Summer of 1990 in Toronto, Canada. By the Fall of 1990, when Mark started attending junior high at E.T. Booth Middle School, and consequently riding my same school bus again, we hadn’t spoken to each other in over a year, which is an eternity at that age. As a junior, I sat in the back of the bus with the other upperclassmen. There were some major bullies on my bus, and they loved hazing the middle-schoolers who rode with us. While I didn’t actively participate in the physical side of the bullying, I did laugh at their antics, and sadly, my sin of omission was that I didn’t do anything to stop them, not that guys like Chuck Lancaster or Tony Dupree would listen to me much anyway. They were sexually-frustrated alpha dogs who turned to bullying as their stress-relief.
Mark didn’t grow into the physical specimen that his older brother had been. He was tiny compared to other kids, and was a loudmouth. This made him the prime target of the older kids’ bullying. His ride home every day would consist of name-calling, spitballs, ear-flicking, and on occasion a raised fist. Back then the bus drivers were kind of oblivious unless things really got out of hand. His life was hell on a daily basis. Eventually, I got my own car and started driving to school so I didn’t have to ride the bus anymore. I can only imagine that the taunts and torment continued.
So that day in 1992, the last time I ever saw him, Mark was sitting in the front seat of the bus. I rode the bus that week because the clutch had gone out on my car, and I forced to slum a ride home on the bus. Mark’s father had just died of lung cancer, his brother was long gone, and he and his mom were moving back to West Virginia where she was from. I had happened to bump into him in the Nintendo aisle at K-Mart about a week before, and we spoke briefly about his dad’s passing. My senior year, we had gotten a really decent man as our new bus driver. Mr. Stackhouse had laid down the law when he saw the kind of treatment that some kids were torturing others with. All that week, I watched as Mark would sit in the front seat, and get up quickly to exit the bus before it had even stopped moving. Per our conversation at K-Mart, I knew that this day, a Friday, was going to be his last day.
As the bus wound its way down the hills towards the lake, I began staring at Mark. My mind drifted back to all the good times we had had together. I wasn’t sitting all the way in the back, but rather on the good side of the wheel hump, and as we turned off Kellogg Creek Road onto Galt’s Ferry Landing Road, I could see a change come over Mark. As I had known him well when we were little, I could tell that he was steeling himself to do something. He got a little grin on his face that began to change into a broad smile (I could see his face because he always sat sideways in the seat). The kids on the bus were all talking and gabbing away, noisily unaware of what Mark had planned, or that it was his last day, or even that his father had just died. As the bus descended the last big hill before his house, Mark rose to his feet. As the bus came to a stop, and the engine noise died down, Mark turned around and faced the back of the bus. With a defiant look on his face, he yelled, “You all suck!” Only, with his squeaky voice, lack of friends, the din of noise coming from everyone’s uninterrupted conversations, and the utter disdain his fellow bus riders felt for him, no one but me heard him. I watched his face, and saw the gleam in his eyes wither and die and he realized that his big moment of payback to all those who had tortured him was a failure. He wilted, and before anyone could even take notice of his failure, he dropped down the steps, onto the road, and took off running for his house. As we pulled away I was dumbfounded that sadness of what I had just witnessed. To this day, I have never seen anything more pathetic and sad in my life. Mark Jenkins had a rough life; I hope the rest of it turned out much better.
[1] It may interest my reader to know that these trenches and foxholes were real things and not just inventions for the story. The were about 300 yards into the woods to the west of Galt’s Ferry Landing Road about 200 yards north of Etowah Street. In 1988, someone bought the lot where the trenches were, bulldozed it to make it flat, and plopped a double-wide mobile home on the property. We were almost inconsolable when we realized what they had done. The trailer wound up being repossessed and the lot was vacant again within a year. I believe someone has since built a home on the property.
