Tough Guys !

When I was in the seventh grade me and my close friends thought we were tough guys and bad boys. We weren't but we thought we were.

We decided to form a gang. We had heard about big city gangs and thought we could have a gang too. To show our togetherness we decided we didn't want to get tatoo's but rather curl our hair. We all got our mothers or sisters to give us a "permanent" on the front half of our hair. The curls stood up right above our forehead and looked ridicolous, I'm sure. We thought we looked cool. We wore the collars on our shirts turned up the way Elvis wore his collars. This made us even cooler (we thought).

We decided each of us needed a weapon. We talked it over and thought a billy club that would fit in your back pocket would be the way to go. We went to the local hardware store and we each bought a bar of solder that was used by plumbers to join copper pipes together. The bars were 12" long and 3/4" square. A perfect size. We took the bars to my dads garage/shop/warehouse and wrapped about 2/3 of the length with strips of rags to form a bulge on the end of the club. It worked perfect. We now had our weapons.

All of a sudden it dawned on us that there weren't any other gangs in town. No one to fight with. Oak Grove wasn't a huge community. The population when I was growing up was 761. So we thought we would "beat up" a few of the nerdy kids but we never did.

My dad saw the club one day and asked me about it. I was proud and eager to tell him. Instead of taking it away from me, as he should have, he told me: "Son, no bigger than you are someone will take that club away from you and beat the living snot out of you."

I told my friends what my dad had said and we all agreed he was probably right. As soon as the permanents in our hair "failed" and grew out we disbanded the gang. No fights ever occurred because there weren't any rival gangs roaming the streets. There were no turf wars. There were no drive by shootings. No one claimed a corner to sell illegal drugs. All-in-all it was a pretty boring experience. But we had fun, I guess.

Tough guys? Not really.