Captain Allbright, talk about an incident in your life that stands out - some important event that helped make you who you are.
Alexa answers: I think the summer after I turned fourteen -- that was when I realized I had to solve my own problems. And I had problems to solve. My sister was ten years older ; by the time I was fourteen, she was married and gone. That left me and my brothers at home. Frank was nineteen that year, while Sean was two years older than me and Billy was two years younger. I don’t think Sean and Billy were bad kids, but Frank was an asshole. Still is, as far as I know.
We always fought, especially Frank and me. I held my own pretty good for a long time and hurt him as much as he hurt me. But the last few years, he encouraged the other boys to join in -- they ganged up on me, and that was hard to take.
For years, I put most of my energy into growing, but that summer Frank noticed I was getting breasts and hips. During one of our fights, Frank pinched my breasts and pulled up my dress. The other two just laughed and hit me, but they looked, too, and made remarks about my ‘titties’. I outran them and stayed with a girlfriend for a couple of days.
I was in trouble. Whenever I complained to the folks about Frank or the others picking on me, Pop just said ‘boys will be boys’ and Mom accused me of starting it. No help there. Those two days I hid out, I thought about it, and decided I had to do something.
The first step was to even the odds. I caught Billy alone and roughed him up a little. I told him that was just a taste of what he would get if he ever bothered me again. He didn’t believe me and went crying to Frank. Frank caught me on the way home from school. He didn’t really do much, just slapped me and told me what he was going to do to me. He was very graphic and had a lot more imagination than I thought.
I couldn’t stop, though. I had told Billy what would happen to him, and if I didn’t keep my word I was screwed in more ways than one. I knew where Billy cut through an alley after playing basketball in the park. I waited for him there. After reasoning with him for ten minutes or so, I left him lying in a pile of garbage. Actually I hurt him worse than I intended; Pop had to take him to the hospital. Frank was totally pissed and was sure that I did it. But Billy got smart and stuck to a story that it was a bunch of guys he met playing basketball.
Sean walked part way to school by himself, before he joined up with his buddies. I scouted the route, worked out a little plan, and tested it a couple of times late at night. On the big morning, I got up early and made it to the right spot ahead of Sean. There were a couple of tree limbs arranged just right -- about ten feet off the ground and five feet apart. A two-by-four put across the limbs was parallel to the sidewalk and just above the only place to walk -- bushes on one side and broken paving on the other forced everyone to the same place.
I put the far end of the two-by-four barely on its limb. I tied a cord to the other end and swung it into the neighboring tree. I crouched up there, holding the cord, and waited for Sean. He came swaggering along, right on time. When he crossed the mark I had made on the sidewalk, I pulled on the cord. The board slipped off the branch and swung like a six-foot club, right into Sean’s face. Wham! Flattened him! Broke his nose, split his lip, knocked out a tooth.
After throwing the board into the bushes, I skinned down the tree and ran up to Sean, yelling bloody murder, him laying there on his back with blood pouring down his face. Actually, I was scared, I thought maybe I had killed him. He wasn’t even out cold, but he didn’t know what the hell had happened to him. People came running up, and someone called the fire department rescue truck. I sat on the sidewalk and held his head in my lap until they came. I told him that now he knew how it felt to be hit and hurt, and maybe after this he would leave me alone. I told him how bad it would be if anything else happened to him, and how I hoped this little talk would be just between us. He never bothered me again, or even said two words to me again, but we were never a close family.
Frank took some thought. He was stronger and meaner than the other two. He was athletic, liked to ride one of those off-road bicycles. So I loosened the front wheel on his bike. It came off as he was going over a jump down by the Charles. He broke his right arm in two places and got a pretty serious concussion. He was in traction for three days. I visited him in the hospital when I knew our folks wouldn’t be there.
At first he wouldn’t talk to me, but I got his attention by fooling with the weights on the traction doohickey. I told him how lucky he was that it wasn’t his car. After all, I said, a wheel could fall off his car, or some other important part, and then where would he have been? Then I talked about how I never wanted him to touch me again. Once his arm healed, he moved to Albany and got a job in a cabinet shop.
I joined the Army right out of high school. I’ve talked to the folks on the phone a few times, but I’ve never gone back to Boston.