Seventies idyll: The leafy, safe, neighborly suburban Detroit street I grew up on. Kids’ paradise. The only thing that wrecked the winter days of snowman building and the summer evenings of butterfly catching was me, and the occasional house fire.

When I was very young, I fit in briefly with other boys. They liked me because I was “funny” (ha-ha funny). Soon enough my utter lack of sporting coordination and overall sensitiveness would relegate me to the girls.

During my brief full membership in the boys’ side of the world, some things happened that called my sensitiveness into question, however. My mom and I were laughing about the following shared memory last time I saw her…

Me and about six other boys from Buckingham Road were playing in my best friend Bob’s backyard one day. I was probably using small rocks as puppets and having them reenact scenes I Asperger’sishly knew verbatim from the Muppets, while the others played catch or ran around punching stuff.

A scout from our group came running down the driveway yelling that a mass of strangers was making its way to our territory from the next street over and they wanted to have a war with us.

Bob’s yard had one of those wooden children’s forts, but this was a particularly imposing one with two stories, on pilings, making it some 20 feet tall and about 10 square feet inside. We all clambered into the fort, and looked out the gunhole at the adjoining yards divided by chain-link fences held up by big dark-green clothespin-shaped posts with the tops painted white.

A group of about 10 strangers moved through the back neighbor’s yard, whooping their war cries, and started jumping the fence. They yanked open the trap door of the fort and declared war! Bob yelled “Who are you?” A few of them yelled back that they were so-and-so’s cousins, visiting from Waterford.

“Waterfurd?” I piped up, in my loudest voice, pronouncing it the way the name of this white trash suburb to the north is pronounced. “So you guys are poor?”

This engendered an uproar from both armies. Though it was over 30 years ago, I can still remember how I felt as the stranger boys invaded the fort, their stranger faces coming into view one by one, and my fury escalating quickly, filling me with rage-ohol and then hardening a resolve in me to save us all, my friends, from these filthy enemies.

As the tallest one of them pulled his way up the ladder rung by rung to the second story of the fort, where I and the other clean/good kids were, I knew what to do.

I waited until he reached the top and was hoisting himself up onto our level. Then with both arms I shoved him over the edge. He landed on his back on the first story, near the trap door, with a fort-shaking boom sound.

Sorry, but if you invade our fort I will do whatever it takes to break your back.

The stranger army was now stock-still, as was my own army, for a solid few moments. My shove victim just moaned a little. I knew I didn’t have long, so skipping several rungs, I tumbled down past everyone and escaped out of the fort.

Though I was probably only about two or three feet tall, and some of them other kids were well over three feet, I levitated down the street with about a 30-foot lead. Running isn’t actually the right word for it. There’s the normal adrenaline-fueled flight in fight-or-flight, and then there’s being washed down the street in a tidal wave of your own terror. I sensed the dirty stranger army, minus one of their original soldiers, behind me, and behind them my own comrades trying to get there in time to defend me, their surprisingly vicious little friend.

Defend me? Yes, everyone knew I couldn’t fight, or at least not fair. The Waterford goons would beat me up if they caught me. And as rogue as I was to the rules of children’s wars, I was still their neighbor-friend and thus deserved protection. So, that is why everyone was chasing me down Buckingham that day.

I wished my mom would have been on our porch to see how fast I ran. She wasn’t, though, so I pulled open the storm door, slammed it, locked it, and screamed out “Mom!” with the last of my kinetic energy. Before she could answer, I had found her in the laundry room in the basement.

I dissolved into crazy-eyed, breathless crying but managed to stammer out the recurring question I would always ask her when I choked on a pork chop or sprained my ankle or whatever: “Mom, would you be sad if I died?”

There was no time, the kids were banging on the screen door, but because this war was not a real war, they knew better than to just bust into our house.

I guess they should have known better than to invade our fort, too.

___

See Also: I Hit a Kid in the Face with a Hammer!

Tags: 1970s, Asperger's Syndrome, Detroit, Forts, Michigan, Muppets, Violent Children