THE SCHOOLYARD LOSER

Anyone who has lost a schoolyard fight will tell you that you don’t need to wait until adulthood to know whether you’re a “winner” or a “loser.”

Despite superior grades and victories in science fairs and essay contests, I was a loser, with Coca-Cola-bottom glasses and pudgy-face crewcut. Kids picked on me. The desperate need to assert my machismo momentarily overruled my basic nature as a crybaby. So I took the bait and always lost.

Georgie was wiry and half my size. He was adept at teasing, and I was an easy mark. One Friday on the way home from school, resplendent in my Cub Scout uniform (which made fighting a cardinal sin), Georgie picked a fight, and I obliged. In a second, he had me pinned to the ground and pummeled me, encircle by a mob of third-graders jeering, “Fight! Fight! N**ger (albeit that Georgie was Caucasian) and a white! C’mon, Georgie! Beat that white!” I cried and ran home to momma. Loser.

By fifth grade, I owned two sources of pride: an Esterbrook fountain pen, just like my dad’s, and a bright red parka. The parka made me even pudgier, but my parents reassured me that it also made me look “just like a Royal Canadian Mountie.”
On the way out to recess, Mickey grabbed the Esterbrook from me. I clumsily chased after him. But Mickey, who still dances in a Broadway chorus line, was fast and wily. He dodged and weaved as I lumbered and stumbled. Then, in a final mockery, he opened the Esterbrook’s bladder and shot black ink over my Mountie coat.

A teacher put Mickey in detention for a week and made him pay for the cleaning. His parents were smug and treated it as a rite of passage. My parents, as usual, made no waves toward them and turned their wrath toward me. My mother saw the ruined coat as the squandering of hard-earned cash and understood nothing of the shame of being the schoolyard lummox. My father, the WWII hero, lectured me on how “the best defense is to just walk away.” I was grounded for a month. Loser.

A few years went by. Another creep discovered my vulnerability and goaded me. But, this was nerdy Talmud camp, so we were all a bunch of losers. I assessed my chances with Moishe and beat him until he started gasping. Not knowing what brutality I had inflicted, I ran to the dining hall to summon the doctor, who made short shrift of the incident. “You just knocked the wind out of him,” he dismissed me. “That’s what happens when you win the fight.”

“Win the fight.” After lo the many years, the victory still feels almost Pyrrhic: You beat Moishe to a pulp, then call the doctor while Moishe gasps for breath. And now he’s a professor at NYU. Loser.

Now no longer 7 or 17, but 57, what I wouldn’t do to have my column syndicated. For years, I’ve sent off packets to various syndicates, predictably receiving no response or a generic rejection note. Once, I did receive a response: The editor told me that my style and language usage were wonderful. “But,” he wrote, “Your writing has one fatal flaw that you’ll never overcome. It is insipid to the core.”

“Insipid to the core.” “Fatal flaw.” Loser.

From that day on, I haven’t spent much time mailing off packets. I fear that the response I receive would just make me want to run home crying to momma. A column of mine might appear here and there, and that makes me happy. And when it doesn’t, I put on my white jacket and pretend that I’m a chef. I make pate de foie, Peruvian ceviche and duck prosciutto. You may not like them. But this I promise: They’ll never be insipid to the core.

So much for the schoolyard loser.