Before I get to my hitting of a kid in the face with a hammer, let me hypnotize you by dangling a soporific question-and-answer session over my story.

What do you call it when an onlooker will not see something that they do in fact see? Tell me!

Maybe it’s the notion of something hiding in plain sight? The Poe story “The Purloined Letter” has Parisian police tearing apart a house looking for a stolen missive with dangerous contents. They look in all the cleverest hiding spots, but give up on the search. Later we read that the letter was hanging right on the wall, lightly disguised. Too obvious to see.

Or maybe the guise doesn’t match the act?

Years ago the comedian Julia Sweeney told a story on This American Life about how when she was in her 20s she sold drink tickets at a dance hall, and alleviated her boredom by stealing the money. When the furtive stealing of small amounts when no one was looking got too boring, she began hauling the money out of the till and putting it in her pocket right in front of her boss’s face. He said and did nothing. Why? Because to him she was such a nice girl, she would never do that. Too disturbing to see.

You can’t believe your eyes, so you just don’t?

Magicians do something called misdirection. If the audience is focused on some legerdemain involving cracking eggs and then making the slimy egg contents disappear all with one hand, they will not notice the lady assistant quickly switching something behind the magician. Too distracting to see.

You feel sleepy, very sleepy…

Self-portrait, age 7

I was about 7. We lived in a pleasant, leafy neighborhood filled with kids with families — I mean, families with kids. Ever a leader and an impeccable host, I had invited some friends over for a casual afternoon of iced tea and/or Tang (your choice!) on the screened-in back porch.

Mid-party I abruptly decided I had a headache and ordered them all to leave.

Five of them did as they were told, and were waiting outside the porch door on the lawn for the sixth kid to follow. He was a new kid on the block with only one parent in his life: a mom. I can’t remember his name, but I considered him a dud and I wanted him off my porch, right now.

“Nope,” he said, crossing his arms and sitting down Indian style on the green Astroturf floor of the porch. “Oh, yes, you will!” I said. He refused to leave.

This will make him leave, I thought, as I picked up a hammer my dad had left on the porch and plunged it into the kid’s mouth. Not super-hard, but hard enough that blood flowed and he screamed in pain.

The kids didn’t see me pick up the hammer in time to intervene because they had their eyes trained on the recalcitrant squatter. He, in the second before I nailed him, might have been thinking, with good reason, because I was a soft-spoken, gentle kid, “Scott wouldn’t hit me with a hammer” — Surprise!

I dropped my weapon and ran into the house, to my parents’ bedroom. I knelt on the floor by the window. Then I prayed a prayer that kids pray everywhere: That somehow I would not get in trouble for this.

My mom ran to the porch from back in the garden behind the garage, following the sounds of children screaming, which she knew was a sign something was wrong.

Hands clasped hard and knees hurting from kneeling, I could hear all the loud crosstalk through the open bedroom window with its flowing white nylon drapes. The clamor soon quieted down. My pulse slowed.

My mom took the kid over to his house and I never really saw him again, though after that his mom would glower at me through their screened front door when I would walk by. He must not have lost any teeth in the… mishap, because if my parents had had to pay a dental bill, then I would’ve gotten in trouble, I think.

But I didn’t get in trouble at all. I walked out of my parents’ bedroom a free man-child. No one mentioned the hammer incident to me again. Prayers work. Either that, or some things are too disturbing to admit we see them.

See! The story was not as bad as the headline made you believe! Misdirection! It turns out I was just a kid myself when I hit a kid in the face with a hammer! Kids do things like that all the time.

Tags: Astroturf, Cognitive Dissonance, Crime and Punishment, Edgar Allan Poe, Julia Sweeney, Magicians, Tang, The Purloined Letter, This American Life, Violent Children