by Ed Hamilton
Sagging Meniscus Press
Trade Paperback
(Excerpt courtesy of the author.)
Author website
Though Lords of the Schoolyard is a novel about bullying, it’s also a coming of age novel.
And even for bullies and budding young criminals such as Tommy, the narrator, and his best friend Johnny, growing up involves a spiritual quest, a search for meaning and a way to live your life, and that’s a big theme in Lords as well. For Tommy and Johnny, that means something to replace not only football—a religion in itself—but also the Catholic Church, which both boys ultimately come to reject.
In the following selection, the boys get caught up in a Krishna Consciousness meeting in a converted school bus. They have been attracted by the brightly painted bus because it looks like a hippie bus, and they think they might be able to score some pot. There’s also a pretty girl who hangs out with the group. The only characters you need to know are Kenny, a young man in his twenties who has long hair and looks like a hippie—he’s the one who recruited the boys for the group—and an old Indian guy, the leader, who is bald and dresses in the traditional Indian robe and sandals. The boys have been promised a big feast if they’ll show up early on Sunday afternoon.
From Lords of the Schoolyard, Ch. 18:
The Feast
We got there right on time on Sunday afternoon, actually a little early. I had rushed to get ready after I got back from church, but it had turned out not to be necessary. We figured there would be trays of food set up outside, since it was kind of cramped in the bus, but there wasn’t anything. A couple of guys were standing around near the bus, together with the girl. We walked up to them and said hi. “Where’s the feast?” Johnny said.
They seemed puzzled. “The feast? Oh yeah, the feast,” the girl said. “Let me get Kenny. He’s inside the bus.”
Kenny came out. “Hi guys.”
“Well, we’re here,” I said.
“Glad you could make it.” He shook hands with us.
“Where’s the feast?” I asked. “Did we get here early?”
“Oh, the feast. It’s inside. Come on inside the bus,” Kenny said.
We went in. We didn’t see any food. They had a small kitchen in the bus but it didn’t look like they were preparing anything there. “Have a seat,” Kenny said. We propped up some pillows against the wall of the bus and plopped down.
Kenny went back outside for a minute and then came back in. The girl and the two guys who had been outside followed him in. “We already had the feast,” Kenny now announced. “You’re a little late and you missed it. Too bad, because it was great! But we’re getting ready to do some chanting. You can stick around for that.”
“Man, I’m really hungry,” I said.
“I’m starving to death,” Johnny said.
“We haven’t eaten anything all day, like you said. We’re gonna have to go get something to eat,” I said.
“Well, maybe we can find something,” Kenny said, reluctantly. He told the girl, “See if you can find anything left over from the feast.”
The girl got to her feet grudgingly and poked around in the kitchen area, clanking some pots and pans, for what seemed like an inordinately long time. Finally, smiling sweetly, she handed us a soggy paper plate filled with disgusting slop. There were slices of brownish apple and banana that had been picked-over and chewed-on, and some raisin-and-carrot mush in a sauce. It looked nauseating. It looked like something the girl had drug out of the garbage.
They didn’t give us any utensils. We kind of picked at it. For one thing we were starving. And for another I guess we didn’t want to be impolite. Nobody there seemed to think anything was wrong with the feast. With the slop. They looked at us as if they were expecting us to enjoy it. I ate a slice of apple. It didn’t taste too fresh. I didn’t feel like messing with the raisin-and-carrot slop.
Kenny was sitting there the whole time watching us eat. “How is it?” he said. “Great, isn’t it?”
“Yeah!” Johnny said.
“Oh, yeah!” I said.
We picked at the feast awhile longer until we were both sick of looking at it. I put the plate on the floor in front of us.
“You guys had enough?” Kenny asked.
We both said we had had plenty.
“Sure you don’t want some more?”
“Nah,” we both said. Not wanting to send the girl back to the garbage can, we both shook our heads, no. Now we couldn’t say we hadn’t had anything to eat.
“You can just hang onto that plate in case you want to nibble a little bit more,” Kenny said.
They shut the curtains and suddenly it was dark in the bus. Then they lit several sticks of incense and the whole bus filled up with smoke. “We’re gonna do some chanting,” Kenny said. He acted like they were just going about their business. “Feel free to join in at any point,” he said. “Of course you don’t have to. There’s no pressure.”
They started chanting and they just kept on going. Though the words were always the same, they had several varieties of the chant, several tunes or tempos. They would start out slow and then get faster and faster, building up to a frenzy. Then they would start over with the slow chanting again and build again. Over and over.
One time I looked up and the old guy had come out of somewhere. I hadn’t seen him come in, but he was sitting there now. He was chanting too. There was a back sleeping area that I think he slipped out of.
They had the bus sealed up to keep the incense in. The thick smoke was swirling all around. There was no other light except what sunlight got in around the edges of the thick curtains. Outside was a bright, sunny day.
I was weak from hunger and feeling light-headed. The chant kept going on and on. “Once you learn it, feel free to join in,” Kenny repeated, then went back to his chanting. The sound was ringing in my ears. By this point I had the song memorized. It would have been hard not to have memorized it.
Hari Krishna, hari Krishna. Krishna Krishna, hari hari. Hari Rama, hari Rama. Rama Rama, hari hari. Over and over.
All the Krishna people looked at us, expecting us to join in. I always felt stupid singing, and I never would sing in church, except maybe to make fun of the words.
But after awhile they made me feel stupid not to sing. At first I looked at Johnny, but after awhile I looked at the other people. I forgot about his presence. At first me and Johnny looked at one another as if it were a joke. But then the song took me over. Pretty soon it was all that was in my brain. At one point I looked over at Johnny and he was chanting. I was still resisting. But then I looked over at Johnny again and he looked at me like I should start chanting too. Like I should get with it. So I started chanting.
At first I felt like an idiot. But then I started enjoying myself. It carried me along and I forgot what I was doing. I forgot myself and went on automatic pilot.
Soon enough, it was tripping me out. I was going into a sort of a trance. We just kept chanting and chanting. It was like I was under a spell and couldn’t stop if I wanted to. The smoke was swirling all around in the dark and I was breathing it in. I kept looking at that old vampire dude. Sometimes he had his eyes closed and his head thrown back and he looked like he was really getting into it. Other times he was looking straight at me. He scared me.
It went on and on. I just kept chanting. Sometimes I looked at Johnny. He kept on chanting too. Everybody kept on chanting. The whacked-out vampire dude kept on chanting. It was dark and smoky and I was sick of breathing the smoke. Beads of sweat were breaking out on my forehead and I was shaky from hunger. I was sick of all their shit, nauseated. I wanted to get out of there, but it just kept going on. Finally it was over. Things seemed oddly silent and Johnny and I didn’t talk much as we walked down the drive toward the road.
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Ed Hamilton’s debut novel, Lords of the Schoolyard (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2017), is an unflinching depiction of bullying in suburban America. Though set in a southern town in the 1970s, the generic suburbia depicted in Lords of the Schoolyard could exist anywhere, at any time, in the U.S.A. For, as Hamilton shows, it’s this very suburban culture—rife with alienation, boredom, and depression, but also with a certain kind of freedom—that is so conducive to random acts of violence. With surgical precision, Hamilton skewers the tired platitudes of sports and religion that are offered up as ineffectual balms for the raw wounds this culture inflicts on its children.
Is there something about growing up in Kentucky that makes it a particularly good setting for a novel about bullying? Are any of these storylines taken from events that happened in your school?
Although I grew up in Louisville, and in a sense that’s the setting of Lords, there’s no mention of any specific town, state, or even region of the country mentioned in the novel. My intention in doing this was to make Lords a book about a generic suburbia that exists all over the U.S.A. It’s this suburban culture—which is rife with alienation, boredom, depression, and anomie, but also with a certain kind of freedom—that is so conducive to random acts of violence. Sure, for one thing, bullying breaks up the monotony, but besides that, there’s something so meaningless and demoralizing about the suburban environment, with its endless identical houses and lawns, that I think it leads kids to not think, or, if they do, to even care, about the consequences of certain actions. Tommy and Johnny certainly don’t think twice about giving smaller boys wedgies or throwing their shoes in the toilet, because it makes them feel better about themselves for a moment or two.
On the other hand, perhaps it’s obvious that I’m a southern writer (even though southern writing tends to be a bit more elaborate than the pared down style I employ in Lords). Southern culture is more macho than northern culture, and there’s also more of an emphasis on sports, so perhaps that’s necessary for the story. For Tommy, and for his father especially, football is almost like a religion. Growing up, I can remember seeing many a boy knocked around by his father (and even more by the coach), and some reduced to tears, because he didn’t perform well on the sports field.
Many of the events in Lords are inspired by things that happened to me, or were observed by me, in my childhood. Though the behavior of Tommy is rather extreme and exaggerated, I did, regretfully, engage in some of bullying behavior myself. I was also the victim at times, though bullying wasn’t a major problem for me, perhaps because I had the ability to fight back.
Since your novel is set before the invention of cell phones and social media, what do you have to say to teachers or parents of teenagers struggling with today’s cyber environment?
There’s been a lot of interest in recent years on the topic of bullies, especially after Columbine and similar shooting incidents in which the victims of bullying appeared to take their revenge. In Lords of the Schoolyard, one of the boys Tommy torments lashes out at him with a linoleum knife, since that’s all that he has handy. Perhaps if he had had easy access to a gun he would have brought it to school—making for a very different novel indeed! The 70s, when I grew up, were in many ways a more innocent time, and there was much less awareness of the problems of bullying and childhood abuse; but we did have some good ideas back then, and tighter restrictions on guns (even in Kentucky!) was one of them.
In some ways we had more freedom back then: from a very young age, perhaps 7 or 8, I was allowed to run around the neighborhood without supervision, forbidden only to cross the four lane highway—though it didn’t take me long to defy that restriction! Due to adult paranoia, Kids today live more regimented lives, something that would have driven me (and certainly Tommy and Johnny) crazy. On the other hand, they also have access to all kinds of violent video games and pornography (I rarely even laid eyes on a Playboy!) that I’m sure I would have loved too, so it’s no wonder kids want to spend more time online. I guess the lesson here is that kids will carve out areas of freedom where they can find them. If they can’t bully in person, they are likely to find ways to bully online.
The solution is not obvious, but part of the message I’ve tried to get across in Lords of the Schoolyard is that kids are mainly emulating adults when they bully. Parents are wasting their breath telling them that bullying is wrong when kids see football coaches, priests, bosses, lawyers, and other respected role models abusing those in their charge. Parents promote violent sports like football, and intolerant religions that repress sexuality and natural curiosity, and then seem shocked when the violence and intolerance leeches into other areas of a child’s behavior. And when the biggest bully of all becomes President, what message does that send? Clearly, bullying pays.
One thing that seems obvious to me is that parents should try to keep their kids away from cell phones and computers, and TV for that matter, for the first few years of their lives. Don’t just use these things as a babysitter. At least this gives the kids a fighting chance to develop an interest in reading and writing—something that turned out to be my redemption—or even just in running around and playing freely outside.
Most of us would rather forget our teenage years. What is it about that time that compels you to return to it in your writing?
Adolescence is a traumatic time for everyone, myself included. It seems like it would be easier to just forget about it and move on, but I’ve always considered it the job of a writer to address difficult subjects. Hopefully, the teen years are easier to read about than to write about, though I think that for most thoughtful people, reading about this period brings back painful memories. So I’ve tried to at least make it funny and entertaining to do so. And perhaps, after all, it’s the job not just of the writer, but of all of us as human beings, to try to make sense of the difficult issues inherent in growing up, so that maybe, just maybe, we can avoid the mistakes others have made. As to why, specifically, adolescence was traumatic for me, I guess I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be like other people. It seemed like I thought about things too much, and took everything to heart. Other boys seemed to just act without reflection, almost instinctively, and to have a much better time about things. I liked reading and writing, and the theatre. But I can’t imagine attempting to explain to my father that I wanted to go into the theatre, rather than play football! In many ways, I was just a bundle of rage, ready to strike out at anyone on hand. Sexual repression had a lot to do with it, certainly, and my Catholic education is partly responsible for this. I wanted to find a softer side of myself, but no way forward seemed in the offing. Like Tommy, I had a girlfriend, and I didn’t understand why she dumped me. But I think the experience hardened me.
So, like I said, these things are hard to write about, certainly, but also, in a way, it’s actually easier to write about traumatic things, because the ideas come fast and furious. All you have to do is steel yourself and tough it out. Well, at least in theory!
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