Tony Smith

Tony Smith and I went to school together. We weren’t in the same classes and we didn’t hang around together. We weren’t friends. I was scared of Tony.
He seemed to be an amalgam of every bully and tough kid I had ever known, since Scott and Mark used to push me around and laugh at me in reception.
Tony skipped classes. He swore at teachers. He wrote graffiti. He was dark and handsome in a cheeky, tough way. He had rough friends, got into fights, had lots of girls who liked him and he smoked. He didn’t like the school or the work (as far as I could tell).
He and I were complete opposites.
I never missed a class, instinctively sucked up to the teachers, had a few wimpy friends (none of whom were girls), hundreds of big, tough pimples and I’ve never been in a fight or smoked a cigarette in my life.
But, somehow we knew each other. I think we were in the same PE class for a semester. He was athletic and defiant and I was clumsy and vigilant, still trying to figure out how to make my newly long arms and legs work together instead of against each other. I once forgot my sneakers and did the class bare foot. Tony and one of his tough friends had a great time calling me a 'bum'.
Even so, he wasn’t really malicious towards me. He would often nod to me as we passed each other in the halls while I quivered in fear. I think I used to fancy that I was the Adrian Mole to his Barry Kent.

Two events hold firmly in my memory of Tony:
Number one was at the first proper ‘high school party’ I ever went to (translation: the first party with drinking, drugs and no parents). I went with one of my wimpy friends and was so nervous beforehand that my hands were shaking as we were dropped off. I wore all the things I thought were cool: red jeans (which later washed out to pink) and a t-shirt with security-blanket brand-name across the front. The party was held in a tiny little inner-city cottage with a back garden the size of a billiard table. A few dim lamps were the only lights on in the entire house. Huge bottles of alcohol stood on a table next to plastic cups and bottles of coke.
I think it was a milestone party for a lot of kids that night. There was a huge controversy because someone sporty and good had announced that they would try some *gasp* dope. It was a sort of defecting from the non-druggy group to the group of people who didn’t do enough homework and got in trouble with the teachers. I over-came my nerves after three short hours, two large bowls of chips and countless cups of coke and even asked a girl to dance at the end of the night. She was the daughter of a friend of my mother’s and we waddled around the floor together in a sort of speeded up waltz.
At one point I remember going outside for some fresh air. It was actually just an excuse to keep moving and avoid the wallflowers I felt growing up around me every time I stood anywhere, trying to work out what to do with my hands. While I stood out the front, planning my next casual pass at the chips and coke table, Tony suddenly appeared, lurching up the street with a girl under each arm.
“Oh my god!” one of them was saying. “He drank like, a whole bottle of vodka!”
“Oh my god!” echoed the other. “Are you okay, Tony?”
Even though he only seemed to able to use about one of his legs at a time, he still had that cheeky grin plastered across his face and was laughing his head off. He leant up against a wall next to the house while one of the girls trotted inside to fetch him some water. One of his rough friends, Chan, ambled onto the front porch and was appropriately appreciative of his drunken state (being drunk was a very big status symbol in year nine).
While Chan basked in the second-hand cool, Tony looked up and saw me. His face lit up.
“Ey Sammy! Whas’ up man?”
It took a second before I could work out what to say. “Not much man. How ya goin’?”
He collapsed into laughter again. “Wicked man! I wanna fuck Kerry-Anna!” (Kerry-Anne was the girl who had just gone inside).
Chan turned and looked at me blankly. I swallowed. What to do?
“Yeah, cool man," I ventured. "Go for it.”
Tony cracked up laughing again as Kerry-Anne came outside again with a large cup of coke. Chan joined in laughing while Tony draped an arm over each girl’s shoulder and used them as crutches to help himself inside. He spent the rest of the night lying on the host’s bed, puking into a bowl of chips.

By that late stage of year nine just about everyone had completely grown out of whatever child-like ways they entered high school with. Girls wore make-up and had older boyfriends. Boys destroyed school property for fun when the teachers weren’t looking and stole chemicals from the science labs.
The cool thing to do around that time was to try to open the locks on other people’s lockers with your own key. Some guys collected bunches of keys (who knows where from) and went around trying lockers all day to see if any would work.
One guy reckoned he knew how crack combination locks by listening for the clicks as he twirled the knob this way and that, but no one ever saw him do it.
Tony didn’t bugger around with random locker break-ins and fiddly bunches of keys. I joined The Group one lunchtime and he threw a Chomp bar at me. It hit me in the head and I sat down quickly, trying to ignore the small tide of braying laughter from the twenty or so other kids who were all eating their own Chomp bars and listening to one of Tony’s not-so-rough friends tell the story of how he had stood guard while Tony vaulted the canteen counter to nab an entire box of Chomps.

The second incident had a history which began later that year.
I had finally convinced my parents to buy me a pair of Nike Air Max running shoes. They were blue and white and cost $120. It was the most expensive pair of shoes I had ever owned. I didn’t need them for anything specific, it was just your average teenage insecurity expressing itself as an obsession with brand-names - a way of buying acceptance.
The only place I was permitted to wear them was once a week for PE. I would bring them to school in a plastic bag, lock them in my locker until it was time to go to the gym and then afterwards try to get away with wearing those soft, comfortable, expensive shoes for the rest of the day - as though I had simply forgotten to change back into my school-approved hard black leather lace-ups.
When I opened my locker to get my prized Nikes, they had disappeared. I remember physically crumpling up in heart-aching disappointment hiding my head inside the locker. I scrabbled pointlessly under the little pile of exercise books I kept in there, but no blue Nikes appeared. The all-too-sensible words of my parents kept playing and replaying in my ears: “They’ll get stolen!”.
When you’re fourteen, having the coolest shoes in the universe stolen from you is only fractionally worse than your parents being right.
I don’t remember what happened after that. I supposed I did PE in my stiff, leather school shoes (I had learned my lesson about doing PE in bare feet). I did find out who had done it though: a tall weaselly-looking kid with snaggled teeth called Daniel. He had one of the biggest bunches of ‘spare’ locker keys in the whole school and three people told me that it was him.
That only made it much worse.
I knew I couldn’t prove anything and there was no way I could have summoned up the guts to actually confront him about it. Not surprisingly, that was only the second-to-last time I ever saw those shoes and the last time I ever went near Daniel.
He knew that I knew he had taken my shoes and every time I saw him, I imagined him grinning at me, teeth like a handful of Tic Tacs, knowing that I was still too much of a scared kid to act without help from adults. I could prove nothing and that made him even safer.

Tony enters this story about a year later, sometime towards the middle of year ten. By this time I had new, not-quite-so-cool-and-expensive shoes and was looking forward to getting my braces off. Rumours had been circulating through the canteen lines and along the margins of classrooms when the teachers turned their backs that Tony hated Daniel. Loathed him. And things were coming to a head.
I never knew why the animosity had developed, but that’s where the battle-lines lay as lunchtimes grew colder and teachers began hassling everybody about wearing their school ties for the winter term uniform properly.
Suddenly, one windy day, it was on. Daniel was in deep deep shit and Tony was going to give it to him. At lunchtime.
Someone challenged someone else to a fight every other week, but it only ever came to blows about once a year, so no one paid any real attention. I was sitting on a bench next to the oval and eating my ham, tomato and onion sandwich and watching a group of boys kicking a footy. Tony and Chan marched past, but didn’t acknowledge me. Five minutes later, there was a brief, whirling scuffle on the opposite side of the oval from the school buildings. Daniel emerged from a flock of onlookers, bounding at high speed across the grass with Tony in hot pursuit. I remember very clearly at that moment noticing that Daniel was wearing a pair of dirty, old, blue Nike Air Maxes. They looked about a year old. I remember smiling slightly as the chase picked up speed. Tony ran with fury, but Daniel’s long, gangly legs were fuelled by fear and soon he had outstripped his pursuer and disappeared somewhere towards the front office.
That was the last time I ever saw Daniel, or my shoes.

There's an epilogue here, but that will have to wait for another blog.