Retrospect: “murderize”

Self-tutoring about people and events from the past: the tutor mentions a colourful character.

“Did ya murderize it?”

So queried an 8 year old kid when I was 7. He wasn’t talking to me, but to one of our group. We were a crowd who sometimes hung out because we lived close together on the base. We didn’t know all of each others’ names. However, we all knew him.

At 8 years old, the kid was an accomplished bully and sadist. Murderize was, so far as I know, his own word, personally invented. He loved to murderize defenseless entities like earthworms and emotionally weak kids. Murderize, referring to bugs and worms, meant kill, but when it came to kids, it meant traumatize. The word lit his eyes when he said it.

I won’t put a name to him, but I’ll call him Bully0, because he was the first true bully I met, and probably the most skilled one I’ve ever known. When we were all playing happily together, he’d find a way to set apart one or two kids and turn the others against them. Not everyone would turn – some just took the sidelines – but there’d be enough grief to please him. I was the victim, sometimes.

Bully0 was not allowed to ride a bike when I first knew him, for reasons no one would say. Perhaps nothing was safe in his hands. A few days after I met him, I saw him, in his garage, say to his younger brother, “See your old tricycle there?”

“Yeah.”

“I can make it into an instrument of killing.”

“Now way,” his brother protested.

Bully0 grabbed the trike and drove it a few feet. There was a worm on the garage floor which he drove over repeatedly, forward then reverse, his head thrown back, laughing.

“You killed nature!” his brother cried out. Seeing the instant tears in his brother’s eyes due to the sudden cruelty, Bully0 was delighted.

Sometimes, watching a situation where he’d caused a fight between other kids, he’d go off to the side and announce, to no-one you could see, “I love it when things get murderized!”

I never saw Bully0 put his hands on anyone. He truly was a psychological predator, far above physical violence. He might be the most cunning person I ever knew, with how he could control people.

Last I saw Bully0, I was 8 and he was 9. He moved away from that base before I did. I wonder what became of him?