When Buddy Clister came up the hill that afternoon he wasn’t his usual shrill, braying self. This was a guy who’d once had a fistfight with Eddie Guster’s mother, and Mrs. Guster had kicked Buddy’s ass and bloodied his nose.
You’d think that would be a pretty tough thing for an aspiring two-bit punk to live down, but Buddy Clister had actually managed to not only survive the experience, but to somehow spin it to his advantage. Chalk it up to childhood, I guess; you had to sort of hand it to a guy who would slug it out with a grown woman in an apron.
Everybody probably has a Buddy Clister somewhere back in their youth: the first guy to smoke a cigarette; first guy to utter the word ‘fuck’; first guy to get his hands on a dirty magazine and, not long after that, to feel up a girl, or at least claim to have done so.
Who knows how or why such desires or knowledge come to some so young, why some seem destined to be prodigies of decadence?
On the lovely autumn afternoon I’m remembering, though, when the sun was hanging there like a herald just above the houses on Banfield Avenue, Buddy Clister, all of a jaded twelve years old, slowly pushed his bike up the hill and announced to the usual assembly of his stingray congregation that he had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior.
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