Here comes the second part of my little Streetview based memoir.

I should warn you that because this edition will talk about my elementary school, it will, to put it mildly, have a distinctly different tone.

All of my memories concerning my home and my neighborhood are pleasant or neutral.

That’s because most of the bad stuff happened in school, especially elementary school. Back then, nobody gave a shit about bullying. Adults ignored it completely. I was the victim of dozens of assaults and just as many thefts and SO MUCH HARASSMENT, and the teachers – including the ones monitoring the playground, who cracked down so hard on things like running too fast or fighting – did absolutely nothing while I was being beaten and harassed by my schoolmates.

As this is the place where most of my really bad childhood happened, this will not be fun or pleasant journey.

Welcome to Tales of the Parkside.

Sorry for the low resolution but this is the best pic I could find.

Looks harmless enough, I suppose. Probably looks like thousands of other schools all over North America. But that’s the thing about bullying.

It happens in perfectly normal places in full view of everyone, including many adults. It’s the most ignored crime in the world. You could ask people who were definitely there on the playground when all the violence happened to me, even people who were active members of the approving audience egging the bullies on, whether they had ever seen someone be assaulted and they would say no.

It’s like this massive cultural blind spot. It was considered “normal” and therefore blended in with all the other normal things like playing on the monkey bars or building sand castles in the sandbox.

Oh look, happy children playing.

It’s changed a LOT – my god, how did that thing get more garishly painted AFTER the Seventies – but that is still the hell that was my childhood.

Part of me still wants to blow that place up while playing this song on my boombox at full volume and laughing.

Have I mentioned lately how glad I am that the meme of the school shooting wasn’t around when I was a kid?

My Dad had guns. He taught me how to use them. I totally could have.

And the next day, the news would say I had done for “no reason”.

Let’s talk about some of the things that  happened to me there while adults watched and silently approved of it all :

1. Had my school bag stolen and thrown up onto the power lines
2. Someone filled both of my shoes with snow and rocks
3. Had a foreign exchange student hate the fact that he got me as a partner in our Secret Santa one year that he bought me the ugliest gift he could find – a rubber vulture (not kidding) – and when I seemed to like it, screamed “No! It’s ugly! Because you’re ugly!” at me.
4. Had people attack me for absolutely no reason and then got blamed for the “fight” because I was “bigger”.
5. Got the brush off from both teachers and administrators when I tried to tell them what was happening to me on the playground, as if nothing could be less important to them and they resented my even bringing it up
6. Pointed out to a teacher that I told the difference between the greater than and lesser than symbols by imagining the symbols wanted to “eat” the bigger number,  only to have her say “You would. ” and then the whole class laughed at me
7. Got yelled at by multiple teachers for quietly reading in class when I was finished with my classwork
8. Had a Grade 2 teacher who actively and openly resented me for being so bright and tried many times to figure out a way to punish me for it without getting in trouble (Fuck you, Mrs. Mcnally!)
9. Almost got thrown down a flight of stairs by two bullies then got admonished by a teacher and told I should be more careful, and
10. The piece de resistance, the time when my bullies literally stomped on my head with the playground monitor less than five feet away.

I could go on and on but those are the lowlights.

Oh, but don’t worry, boys and girls. I eventually learned how to escape my tormentors and to be sage all through recess and lunch.

By hiding in this thing :

In spring and fall, it would be filled with water

No,. that’s not the world’s first and only stone dumpster.

That’s some sort of large decorative planter. I think. That’s my best guess as to its original intent, anyhow.

I have never seen it in use for anything.

What you can’t see is that the thing is only about a foot deep. So to hide in it, I had to lay down completely flat and stay that way.

For the entire lunch hour.

I experienced many things that way. Because no matter what was in there –  whether it was water or snow or sharp pointy rocks – I had to lie on it for as much as an hour at time just to be safe at school.

Sometimes I read in there – all the time terrified that the sound of my turning pages would alert the bullies to my presence – but most of the time I couldn’t because it there was too much water or snow and the book would get wet.

I want you to picture this : an eight year old boy laying face down in a pool of icy water in a cage that’s only a foot deep and barely wide enough to fit him – willing himself to turn invisible and terrified of the sounds of his fellow students because he was sure that at any minute, they were going to come get him and drag him out of his horrible hole and inflict serious violence upon him that he was powerless to prevent.

And remember, this kind of thing was considered normal.

I guess that’s enough for today. I am too emotionally drained to go looking for pictures of the inside of the place. All the really bad stufff happened outside anyway.

To this day, the sounds of a busy, active playground makes me feel like collapsing into the fetal position and never ever coming out of it ever again.

For me, it was never a playground. It was hell.

And everybody knew that.

And nobody cared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Decided that I would take a trip down memory lane today, and thanks to the miracle of Google Streetview, I can takeyou with me.

Let’s start with this :

We all come from somewhere

There it is, the house I grew up in. The one place I felt safe in the whole universe for the first 20+ years of my life. A place I still miss, but know it will always exist in my heart.

Some things have changed. When I lived there, the house was white with blue trim. A particular blue that my Dad liked called Bristol Blue.

That’s this color. But solid, not translucent.

And the steps to the front door have been replaced,. which comes as no surprise to me as the ones my Dad built, as impressive as they were, were made of wood and even with the best of waterproofing, the Prince Edward Island winters took their toll and it was kind of wobbly and rumpled looking when I lived there.

That concrete step, although lacking in personality, makes WAY more sense.

Here it is at a different angle.

My whole life there, one of those two bedrooms on the top floor was mine.

That small window above and between the two on the top floor was the window to the attic. I have never been in it. It’s the only part of the house I have never seen.

That’s because it’s where my childhood imagination decided all the monsters and ghosts and child kipnapping aliens who would interpret any sounds I made as the signal to come GET me (for reals) lived.

Plus I would have had to get a ladder and it would have been a whole thing.

But mostly it was the monsters.

Here’s the neighbour’s house.

I never knew the neighbors on the other side.

See that deck? That’s the deck my father “helped” our neighbour Harley build. In other words, he mostly built the deck while Harley watched.

That’s because when Harley tried to do it himself, the result were kinda pathetic. And my father loves to make himself useful.

Harley paid us back through his job as an indisutrial sized snow blower operator for our town. When he was driving the snow plot through our neighborhood, he would make a little turn and clear out both our driveway and his.

I miss knowing my neighbours.

That’s also the house where one of my preschool besties Trish lived. We spent a lot of time together along with Janet from across the street.

Mostly we did girl stuff. Hopscotch, skipping rope, dolls. Feel free to connect that to my homosexuality however you wish.

Janet lived here, in the Votour residence.

There were a LOT of Votours. Because Catholicism.

The Votour’s and Harley’s brood were the closest thing our family had to friends of the family. In that we knew them enough to say hello.

We didn’t, like, do stuff with them or anything. We were not that kind of family. We didn’t even do stuff with any of the zillions of my mother’s relatives.

In fact, we rarely did stuff as a family, period.

It was a bright but cold way to live.

And here is the stretch of street where I played as a child.

This used to be my playground.

It was safer than it might look because our little portion of Belmont Street betweeo Russell and Eustane was not a vital connection between two major streets and so it did not get a huge amount of traffic.

In my childhood, that stretch of pavement was a badminton court, a hopscotch board, a street hockey rink, a roller skating rink. a beginner’s bike riding space, and a great place to play catch or throw the frisbee around.

Around the corner we have this place :

Nobody lived here for very long, for some reason.

Everyone in the neighborhood called this place the Minitel because there was always like ten people living there at any time and nobody stayed there for long.

Presumably, sharing a house with nine other people gets real old real fast.

Chez Cormier, when I was a kid

That’s where one of the unfortunates who tried their hardest to befriend me only to get frozen out, Shiela Cormier (pronounced cor-me-ay) lived. She was a very sweet girl who collected things with cows on them and would have made a great friend.

But I was an alien child, and could not connect with Earthlings.

That, by the standards of my neighborhood, is quite a bold color scheme. We don’t normally do that level of contrast. Even the blue and white house I grew up in did not look like that.

I think the real problem is that they painted EVERYTHING blue and that’t just plain too much blue. It insists upon itself.

Across the street and down the block from that is :

That is one adorable house.

That’s where my brother’s friend Barry Thomas lived. His whole family has a unique genetic legacy that gives all the males :

1. A glass nose. The slightest tap makes it bleed.
2. A superhuman pain threshold. Don’t ask them to demonstrate it. It’s not pleasant.
3. Superhumanly fast reflexes.

They are amazing. If I was creating an army of super-soldiers. I know where I would start. Barry’s brother Wally was a heck of a guy to get a ride from, because he drove like a professional stunt driver and liked freaking people out by demonstrating.

And next door to him :

Now imagine a full sized 18 wheeler parked beside it.

There’s where my brother’s friend Bloyce Albert (pronounced al-bear) lived. He, Barry, and my brother were partners in crime for a lot of my childhood.

I was scared of Bloyce when I was little because he was a rough and tough working class guy with a very strong presence and an aura of power about him.

But he’s actually a great guy. One time I said something about being weird in his presence, and he gave me a sitcom-father quality speech about how you want to be yourself but you don’t want to be too weird or you won’t fit in.

Obviously, I didn’t heed the advice. But it made a very strong impression on me.

Well, that’s it for this little tour of my childhood neighborhood. Originally I wanted to base this around the route I took to school when I was a kid, but then I realized that there was too much I wanted to do from my home block, so that will have to wait.

But it will be coming. I really want to show people my schools. Especially my elementary school. A lot of what made me who I am today happened there.

Most of it was bad.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.