It’s been a few weeks since Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, wherein I shared the beginnings of my major middle school friendships. Before I delve back into those stories, considering checking out any or all of these great middle grade books!
Ahh … The Hate Triangle. As a refresher, here are the first two sides (vertices?):
Mike: A pale, dark-haired boy with otherworldly dodgeball skills. We had a healthy competitive streak, where I mostly won at athletic challenges and he creamed me at video games. Incredibly clever, an excellent storyteller, and deeply moral; he never swore, never touched alcohol or cigarettes, and avoided girls throughout grade school (although that was fairly mutual).
Ryan: tall and acned, with Brillo-y hair and thick glasses. He was a fellow fantasy reader and PC gamer. He disliked Mike, who disliked him back, and yet we all ate lunch together. Ryan and Mike would exchange snarky quips while I kept trying to change the subject to comic books or Star Trek. Eventually I’d give up and go order a second tray of tacos or ham boat, which might explain why I hit 215 in high school.
The Fourth Wheel
The final addition to our lunch table was Steve Goldberg, a diminutive, bespectacled Jewish boy. I always remember him smiling, neatly groomed and sporting a fresh polo shirt. Like Mike, he hated Ryan, citing similar charges of dishonesty. Mike seemed indifferent to Steve, accepting him into the group by sparing him from most of his sarcastic comments.
I knew Steve in passing from school, but I didn’t really befriend him until I saw him playing outside my apartment building one day.
“You live here?” I said by way of greeting.
He smiled and shrugged. “My dad does. I visit him most weekends.” He pointed to the apartment above mine. “Wanna come up? He has a big train set.”
I obliged, and we would hang out from time to time, sometimes at his dad’s, but more often at his mom’s, even though it was a bit of a walk from there — at least a mile uphill from my place. His mom was notoriously meticulous; she had plastic on much of the furniture, and everything we had had to have a bowl and a napkin under it. We mostly stayed in his room and played Super Nintendo or watched TV.
“What’d you do in Seminar today?” Steve piped at lunch one day. Goldberg desperately wanted to be in Seminar — he had been tested twice and missed the IQ cutoff by one point, he said. He had a slight grudge toward me that I was in Seminar, as if he thought I wasn’t as smart as him.
One day we were in front of my apartment, trying to climb a tree. I couldn’t get him to pull himself up after me. “I’m the brains and you’re the brawn,” he replied.
Have you seen me? I’ve never been the brawn. I became a little stocky in middle school — my pants said “husky” — but no one mistook that for muscle. I got beat up every year from 4th to 10th grade, so I guess nobody else received the memo that I was the brawn around here.
One day we were walking to the comic store after school — Ryan, Steve, and me. Ryan never was a physical guy, and he rarely indulged in the verbal combat that Mike excelled at. However, Mike wasn’t around, and the lingering dislike between Ryan and Steve resurfaced. Ryan began teasing Steve, who never was very good at giving it back — his voice would just get more shrill as he tried to poke holes in the logic of a sarcastic barb or caustic witticism.
Halfway to the comic store, Steve snapped. Fed up with Ryan’s harassment, Steve pulled a pencil out of his backpack with a feral growl and gripped it like he was in a knife fight.
Without missing a beat, Ryan bent his knees and spread his arms wide like he had just stepped into the Octagon. Steve started talking smack then, raking the air with the pencil. Ryan kept his mouth shut as he shuffled left and right, staying out of range, with a level of focus and agility I never saw in him before or since.
Steve lunged. Ryan stepped aside.
Ryan juked. Steve flinched back.
Seeing his opening, Ryan stepped forward and swung his foot hard.
He booted Steve so hard in the groin that the kid lifted off the ground a couple of inches — somehow both magical and excruciating at all once, like a ballet crossed with MMA.
With a howl, Steve landed and crumpled to the ground, balled up in the middle of the road in the fetal position. I don’t think I left him there to die, but I can’t honestly say I remember checking on him/helping him up/offering succor in any form. The closest I probably came to a sympathetic gesture was not laughing right away, but I can’t even guarantee that happened.
In high school, Mike and I used to walk every day to the Galleria Mall, about two miles each way, to play at Champions Arcade. We would save our $2.50 in lunch money for the arcade — that would buy us ten games of Street Fighter 2. The trek was admittedly risky; not only did we cross a busy street and a highway, but we had to cut through an industrial park, crawl under one fence and climb over another. When you’re fifteen, you take these things in stride.
Well, not always. One day, we invited Steve along. He liked playing Mortal Kombat II at the York Mall, but the upgraded version was only at the Galleria.
He was cooperative enough when we dashed across Market Street between cars.
He didn’t complain as we traversed the glass-and-nail-strewn alley behind WalMart.
When we crossed the stream beside Caterpillar, Inc., he cracked a few jokes.
Crawling under the fence? Not a problem for a little guy like him.
But when we climbed up the weedy embankment to the gravel shoulder of Route 30, this 15-year-old boy — nay, man, having already attended his bar mitzvah — clung to my arm like a blood pressure cuff and burst into tears.
“W-we can’t do this!” he blubbered. “I can’t cross a highway! What if we got hit?! My mother would never get over it! Never! Go back! We have to go back!”
I weakly tried to coax him across the four lanes of streaming traffic, but it was no use. He was anchored to that spot. Maybe Mike shrugged and turned back first. Maybe I suddenly realized how stupidly dangerous this endeavor was. Maybe I just felt bad for leaving him behind after the groin-shot of ‘93. Whatever the reason, I said no more and we all headed home in relative silence, other than Steve’s intermittent sniffling.
During Christmas break one year, I was parked in a bean bag next to a festive tin with assorted popcorn flavors, playing some Sega Genesis. I heard a knock at the door, but I was in the zone, so it took me a minute to realize my grandma was talking with Steve.
Back in those days, it was unheard of to show up at someone’s house without calling first. None of us had cell phones, so it could get tricky nailing down plans to hang out with anyone. Still, even with close friends, you gave them a heads up before stopping by. So when Steve sauntered into my room unannounced, I was a little thrown off.
However, I was in a good mood, living my best life, so I welcomed him with a smile. “Hey, what’s up?” I said, possibly even extending the courtesy of pausing my game to make eye contact.
“Oh, hey,” he replied with that perpetual grin of his. Then his face clouded over. “So, what, we’re friends now?” he shouted, his fists jabbing down at his sides.
“Um, what?” I said around a mouthful of caramel corn. My hand was partway toward a second scoop, dangling like a broken skill crane.
“You act embarrassed to hang around me at school, but now we’re all buddy-buddy? You think you can treat friends like that?” He was flushed, his usually shrill voice deep and forceful for perhaps the first time.
I was stunned. This came out of nowhere — I was the linchpin of these friendships, I told myself, the Good Guy Glue holding everyone together.
“What are you talking about? I didn’t —”
Then he laid it out for me: a dirty laundry list of awful interactions.
The time Mike and I locked Steve in a closet at the JCC.
The time I coaxed Steve into putting chili on Ryan’s seat at lunch.
The time Ryan and I pranked Mike with fake notes from a girl he liked.
In that moment, I saw the terrible triangles I had formed, turning two against one again and again. I was a rotten friend, and no amount of gaming or junk food was going to change that.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said, barely able to look at my accuser. “I shouldn’t have — you’re a good friend.”
He hit me with a few more rounds before running out of steam, but we ended up cool again. I handed him a controller as a peace offering. He smiled, wiped off the cheesy fingerprints, and joined the game.
When the Hate Triangle fell apart, there was no big blowout or dramatic turning point. One by one, we moved on in one way or another. This was strange for me, because up to then, I was always the one moving away; I ended up being the last of the quartet to abandon York for greener pastures.
Steve left first; after his father unexpectedly passed, his mom moved them to Baltimore, where he managed the transition from a snobby middle school to an inner city high school surprisingly well. Despite being a shorter-than-average, unathletic Jewish kid, he landed a girlfriend and carved out a niche for himself amongst the honors students. He ended up becoming valedictorian, went to Johns Hopkins for medicine, then earned his Ph.D. in epidemiology at Stanford. He is now a head scientist at major pharmaceutical company.
I guess I’m the brawn after all.
After 10th grade, Ryan left high school to attend Bard College for early admissions. We hung out once after that, when he was home on spring break, but it was awkward (and that’s saying something for two introverted comic book nerds). We played some mech-themed PC game, tried to reminisce about old times, and made some vague gesture toward keeping in touch down the road. We might exchange a Facebook comment once a year, so I guess we made good on that promise.
Anyway, Ryan went on to run the IT department at Stanford (where he briefly crossed paths with Steve), then started an open-source gaming website. He is now happily married, has two kids, and is a big-shot at top gaming company.
He is, at minimum, 1000 times cooler than me.
Finally there’s Mike.
Mike, Mike, Mike…
He and I stayed in touch for the longest, even after he went away to college and stayed local. Over email, we wrote four movie scripts together, launched a weekly newspaper, and had a short-lived but well-received webcomic. Those collab sessions remain some of the most enjoyable projects I have ever worked on, and I didn’t make a cent off any of them.
After college, Mike went from pizza delivery boy to Walmart shelf stocker to online video editor. We fell out of contact during our 30’s, but I reached out to him during COVID to mend fences. We resumed a more subdued version of our old camaraderie; rather than gaming together or writing movie scripts, we exchange humorous emails and occasionally get together to have bad Mexican food.
Mike has settled into his dream job as a successful cybermerchant; if you had told him thirty years ago that would be his job, he would have begun gleefully speculating about what percentage of his body was robotic. He earns a steady income from reselling video games, vintage clothes, and VHS tapes on eBay, capitalizing on the nostalgia so many of us have for our youthful joys.
I get the sentiment, buddy, but you can’t put a price on this.