The Dirty Kid

an original piece of fiction by Drew McWeeny

Pete was always the dirty kid.

That wasn’t the only thing that stood out about him, of course. He was spectacularly dim, one of those kids so aggressively stupid that you wonder how he remembers essentials like breathing or drinking water. He was also the kid who would eat anything for money. Anything. Tree bark. Dirt. Moldy fruit. A live tree frog once. That last one was a real show-stopper and earned him a gross total of $11.78 and a mostly-full box of Pop Tarts.

When I think of Pete now, I think of two things. I think first of how perpetually dirty he was and how I’ve never met anyone else who achieved that same level of ongoing filth. It was like body armor. It was like a decision that he made at some point and he wore it proudly. Honestly, I would have never met Pete or spent time around him on an ongoing basis if it weren’t for the Boy Scouts.

My father was a Boy Scout. He loved it. He loved it so much he wanted me to be a Boy Scout so I could love it, too. That’s a good and genuine thing to want and I respect my father’s wishes. I get what it was that he wanted. The thing is, he grew up in rural Memphis in the 1950s, a time and a place where Scouting offered up a structure for serious friendships and an education that was important, something he could actively use in his life.

Boy Scouting was, to put it kindly, different for me. I was a Boy Scout in Chattanooga in the 1980s and my fellow Boy Scouts were, for the most part, redneck sociopaths who spent the weekly meetings trading porn and lies about girls and then playing extra-violent games of “smear the queer” in the church parking lot. I was a bookish nerd who loved horror movies, Saturday Night Live, and science-fiction pulp paperbacks, big for my age and angry about everything. It was not an easy or productive mix.

As much as the weekly meetings seemed to be designed to test me, they were nothing compared to our camping trips. There were at least six overnights a year, including a big two-week trip every July to a special Scout camp high in the Cumberland Plateau, and when we spent that time away from home, it was more Lord of the Flies than I think any of the adults ever truly understood. I did my best to convey to my parents how concerned I was about the casual nonstop cruelty, but I don’t think parents ever really believe the secret world of their children is as crazy or horrible as it is. It’s like they forget their own sadistic bullies, like the scars of childhood fade so much that they can’t believe that anything ever made them.

I didn’t even catch the brunt of the bullying. I was in the mix, sure, but I was big enough and angry enough that on the occasions I was given some heat, I gave plenty of heat back in return, in volume and intensity sufficient to keep people from trying it twice. I developed other survival tactics as well. Besides, there were other kids who were much better victims than me. I wish I could tell you I stopped the predators from picking them off, but I didn’t. When you’re that age, you’re just happy it isn’t you at the bottom of the dog pile.

For example, there was a little kid named Dale Hoot, and when I say little, I mean permanently and irrevocably little. We were just on the cusp of being teenagers, and Dale stood a solid three and a half feet tall, most of it mouth. Dale made up for his physical volume with his vocal volume and he seemed determined to make sure the big kids heard him. The problem was when they heard him, they paid attention to him, and when they paid attention to him, they hazed the ever-loving shit out of him. We frequently camped at the Chickamauga battlefields and Dale Hoot’s big mouth once got him tied upside-down to a Civil War cannon wheel overnight, naked as the day he was born. The adults who were along on that trip wrote it off as “overaggressive horseplay” because clearly they were running some sort of side bet on which one of us would end up dead.

They should have had all their money on Pete.

I look back at him now, and he breaks my heart a little. When you’re that age, you don’t think that about another kid, but clearly, Pete was not operating with a broad support network. He would show up at the church parking lot for our camping trips without any kind of backpack or luggage. One time, he brought a grand total of $6.19 to scout camp for fourteen days. Considering most of us spent that much of the road trip to the camp, that was not remotely enough and that’s what led to his first lightning round of “I will eat that for the right amount of money.”

He seemed determined to avoid bathing at all cost and that two week trip was the first time I ever saw it come to a head. We were in our second week and it was morning shower time. Pete managed to disappear right around this time every day, and instead of just letting him take a fade, the older kids decided to track him to see where he was going.

As it happens, Pete’s idea of a sanctuary was the dense cluster of bushes directly behind the showers. He figured he would head to the showers with us, then peel off at the last minute and just hide back there every day. He got away with it for nine straight mornings, jumping back in line with everyone as they left and headed back to camp while never once disrobing or even to the best of our knowledge changing his solitary Scout uniform.

Derek Butler and Ray Borden were the two Bully Kings of our troop, each of them the size of a 38-year-old weightlifter and without the burden of any annoying moral compass to navigate when making decisions. They had been deputized in this mission by the actual Scout leaders, who would of course later deny asking anyone to do anything about Pete’s encroaching wall of stink. When they found Pete, they ordered an eager mob of underlings to surround him and pounce on him. Once they had him secured, they hoisted the protesting kid onto their shoulders and marched him into the shower, clothes and all.

Pete fought them with everything he had. He cried. He cursed. He told Butler that he would kill him. Nothing mattered. They held Pete in the water for exactly five minutes as they used their fists to literally beat a half a bottle of Prell into his hair and his clothes. He was still filthy for the rest of the trip, but tolerably filthy.

Honestly, he got off easy that time. He may have hated water, but there were things he hated far more. Fire, for example. See, Pete had a habit, the other thing I think of when I think of him, that was even more unfortunate than his aversion to bathing, although thinking back, maybe they were related.

Pete was highly flammable. He was 14 years old, stood just shy of six foot, and had kinky blonde hair that looked like an electrical storm. If you included the clothes, his boots, and the five pounds of dirt he walked around caked in at all times, Pete weighed about eleven pounds. He looked like a lollipop stick that someone shredded at one end. That kinky blonde hair of his could have been converted to a natural fuel source. And on at least three occasions I can recall, he burst into flames.

He wasn’t blameless, of course. I’m not talking about spontaneous combustion. But I’ve never met anyone else who was more of a human Tiki torch than Pete. The first time was during that same trip to the Chickamauga battlefield, earlier in the same night Dale Hoot got tortured. We packed a lot into those trips.

Earlier in the evening, we had a bonfire, and we spent most of the day planning it. A few people decided to make torches, always a great idea when you’re putting together a group of white people near a Civil War battlefield, and they were shredding old shirts and wrapping sticks in the rags and then soaking them in kerosene that they let dry for a few hours. Fun stuff. Totally safe.

Pete, on the other hand, spent most of the afternoon mooching Skoal off of people and playing his own personal favorite game, a mumblety-peg variant he called “Split The Bitch.” Pete was notorious for winning the game by never moving his foot, no matter how bad a throw, and by throwing like a maniac, terrifying his opponents into moving. I saw him stick his knife into at least three different kids’ boots.

By the time we got to the bonfire, everyone else had these torches they had prepared earlier and Pete got agitated. He wanted a torch. He didn’t have an old t-shirt to shred, though. As always, Pete had his uniform that he was wearing and whatever was in his pockets and nothing else, so he decided to improvise, grabbing a roll of toilet paper from the tent he was sharing with three other kids. He jammed that onto the end of a stick and then grabbed a can of DeepWoods Off, spraying the roll of toilet paper at close range until the entire can was empty. While doing this, he held the stick low enough that he was also spraying his own pants, something the rest of us would have noticed if Pete had done this in front of us.

Trouble was, we were already at the bonfire, and we all had our own problems to deal with. I was using my stick to burn the shit out of marshmallows that I whipped at my friend Chris, pretending they were flaming pumpkins because that seemed like a better use for them than actually eating them. I loudly called him Ichabod Lame. He loudly called me The Headless Homo and threw them back at me. Everyone left us alone since it seemed like we had our quota of bullying covered. Sure, we did it to each other, but as long as it happened, the big kids were satisfied.

When Pete caught up with everyone, he stank in a different way than normal. The bug spray was strong. He’d used almost an entire can’s contents on one roll of toilet paper, soaking it so that it was plastered to the stick now rather than hanging on the end of it. By the time he ran up, the other torches were lit, five or six of them in total. Pete brandished his torch and yelled, “Hey, guys, I found this!” Before anyone could stop him, he poked it into the bonfire like he was harpooning a whale.

The toilet paper roll went off like a bomb.

As it did, it burned so bright that even when I turned away, there was a floating black hole in the center of my field of vision for the next hour. In addition, it flung flaming napalm-like toilet paper fragments everywhere, clinging to everything it hit including Pete’s arms. Pete let loose a hillbilly yodel as he threw the torch, which was now burning like a newborn star, windmilling his arms and running in a circle.

Solid plan. Should have worked. Unfortunately, Pete’s ever-widening arc carried him right through the much-smaller cooking fire which we’d built on the other side of the campsite. At that point, it looked like Pete was wearing chaps made of fire. It was a startling amount of flame, unexpected, and later we learned Pete had doused the toilet paper in gasoline he got from the Scoutmaster’s car because he was concerned the bug spray “wouldn’t look boss enough.” His blue jeans were soaked in various flammable liquids by the point he joined the rest of us, running faster now that both hemispheres were on fire.

Ray Borden finally had the presence of mind to tackle Pete and to roll him, and almost immediately, they were able to put him out. Someone else found Pete’s torch and ran it down to the creek to dunk it. Several of the Scouts quickly peeled Pete like a banana and somehow, his long flannel shirt and his crusty blue jeans had served as a heat shield. His hair was smoking a bit at the edges, but he was largely unscathed.

For anyone else, that would be the story they tell the rest of their life. “Hey, remember that time I caught on fire? Wow, that was crazy.”

For Pete, that was the warm-up.

Round two came the following winter when we took one of our annual trips to Packer’s Farm. Owned by a friend of one of the troop leaders, it was a large working farm complete with several barns. The barn closest to the house was the oldest, a former horse barn, and it was primarily used by this point to store hay. Lots of hay. The hayloft was stacked deep, and you could jump out of it safely, never worried about hitting the floor of the barn.

We camped there near Christmas every year, and we used the hayloft as our bunkhouse. All of the Scouts piled their sleeping bags into the upper loft, and that’s where we slept at night. The grown-ups all had bedrooms in the house because this was Chattanooga in the winter and the snow was knee-deep and they weren’t out of their goddamn minds.

We had to learn tricks to keep warm each night, which was the point of the camping trip, and one of the key tricks we learned was how to make a hot rock. You’d find a big heavy stone during the day and you’d put it next to the cooking fire. You’d leave it there all day long, and then right after we finished cooking dinner, you’d take the rock out of the fire and you’d bury it. At bedtime, you’d take the rock, which was now cool on the outside, and you’d wrap it in newspaper, then put it in the bottom of your sleeping bag where it would warm your feet. It was a precise art, and we all got very good at doing it. The more daring you were, the longer the heat would last.

Pete, shockingly enough, was not a patient man. He also did not learn from experience. I could not tell you what occupied Pete for the majority of the day, but it was only as we were getting ready for dinner that he decided he should make a hot rock. He found one about the size of a baseball and dropped it right in the center of the fire. Strike one. When it was time for everyone to head to bed, he skipped the entire step where you bury the rock for a while. Strike two. His solution was to use an entire section of the newspaper, figuring that would wrap it enough that he’d be fine. Strike three.

Maybe twenty minutes after we settled in for the night, Pete loudly said, “Knock it OFF!” even though no one was doing or saying anything. With a muffled THWOOMP, Pete’s feet went up like a match had been struck. Unlike the first time he caught fire, this immediately became a reason for concern for the rest of us because we were all surrounded by highly-flammable bedding, and many of us were zipped in tight.

Without anyone saying a word, the four Scouts closest to Pete leaped to their feet and leaned in to grab his sleeping bag. They hoisted him so that he slipped further down into the bag, vanishing completely into it, and then they swung him out over the edge of the loft. They dropped his sleeping bag like a big flaming tear, and when he hit the floor of the barn with an upsetting, solid sound, the flames were smothered immediately. He rolled sideways, moaning, the bottom of his sleeping bag smoking, and when we inched over to look down at him, he looked like a cigarette someone had ground out under their heel. He stayed there ‘till morning, smoldering. We were fine with that.

The last time I saw Pete was near the end of my time in Scouting. My father seemed to sense that I was reaching the end of the road, and it was clear that I wasn’t going to get the same things out of it that he did. He held out hope because his own rewards had been so great. After all, he met my mother at a Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts mixer when they were teenagers, which I would count as a definite plus. By the time I was in Scouting, I’m not sure they would even tell us where Girl Scouts met, much less put any of them in harm’s way by suggesting some kind of mixer with the animals that made up my troop. My dad decided that as long as I made it to a certain rank, I could then call it quits, and that meant bearing down and getting it done as quickly as possible and going to more weekly meetings than normal just so I could race through a checklist.

Those weekly meetings were largely about managing inertia. You put that many kids who are armed and bored in a room and you put all the responsible adults in another room and you are going to have problems. Our meetings started as a larger group, with everyone together, then broke up into smaller patrols, each of them led by one of the older kids, each of them secluded in their own room. Bad idea. It turned each of the meeting rooms into an individual fiefdom, ruled by whim and petty furies. Butler’s patrol was considered the best of the bunch, simply because they were the ones who largely rained misery on everyone else, and I had always done my best to avoid Butler’s attention in any way. Once I went into overdrive to try and finish, though, Butler’s patrol was perfect because he was willing to help me shortcut the process. He seemed to appreciate my new fire even if it was in service of getting the hell out of there.

Butler cherry-picked the apes he wanted close to him, but he also made a few choices purely for the sake of entertainment. He kept Pete close because no matter who else he had in his patrol, they inevitably did better than Pete did, and that gave Butler an example he could point at when trying to motivate the new kids. Pete was dim enough that he seemed happy to be a perpetual punching bag, and he would tolerate anything as long as he was included.

On one particular night, that meant watching nervously as Butler learned to open and strike his new Zippo lighter with the Penthouse magazine key logo engraved into it, because of course his Zippo had a Penthouse logo. Butler was expounding to all of us about some new lie about some new girl and with one hand kept repeating the same series of motions with the steel lighter.

SNAP! He’d pop the cover open by pressing his thumb against it until the spring tension pressed back.

POW! He’d strike the wheel by snapping his fingers.

CLACK! He’d slam the cover closed, then slide the lighter back to the starting position, his thumb tight against the lid.

SNAP! POW! CLACK! SNAP! POW! CLACK! I was working on the written portion of one of the merit badges I had to finish to get my Life Scout badge, and I remember smelling it before I saw it.

SNAP! POW! CLACK! Just that quick, the room suddenly smelled like a bag of Krystal burgers that someone microwaved too long, and when I looked up, Pete looked like he was smoking a cigarette, but I couldn’t see a cigarette. There was a sudden cloud that seemed to swallow his head and it was impossible to see where it began.

“Pete… what are you smoking?” I asked.

“I’m not.”

“But you are.”

By this point, everyone had realized that something was happening even if they weren’t quite sure what was happening. Butler went SNAP, but he missed his grip this time and his lighter rocketed right at Pete’s head with incredible force. Pete’s head flew forward and struck the table, leaving behind a puff of smoke in the shape of his head like a cartoon character had just run off-camera, giving all of us an unobstructed view of the back of Pete’s head and the flames that suddenly engulfed his hair.

“Is it bad?” Pete asked, face down on the table, and instead of answering, Butler leapt to his feet and grabbed Pete by the shirt. He gestured at several of the larger guys in the room and they all jumped up and helped lift Pete so he was suddenly horizontal instead of vertical. Butler kicked the door to the room open and bellowed, “PETE’S ON FIRE AGAIN!” before charging into the main meeting room, clearing a path to the water fountain in the hallway for the guys who carried Pete between them.

That was the last time I ever saw him. He looked back at the rest of his, his hair all smoking and burning by this point, and he actually waved, like he was just headed home the same as any other week. He vanished around a corner and there was a loud CLANG like someone rang a bell. As we left that night, we saw where they had dented the side of the water fountain by running Pete into it at full speed before they finally managed to extinguish him.

Thankfully, that was pretty much it for me and Scouting. I only went to a few more meetings and Pete was busy recovering that entire time. Horribly, the particular burnt meat smell he left behind that night lingered the rest of the time we met there, just as the images of him with his toilet-paper torch or in his cigar-butt sleeping bag or hoisted like a battering ram at the gates to a city under siege linger with me even now.

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