Welcome, Ven a gozar!

I had a friend of sorts a long time ago, I will call him Brad. He was two years older than me when we were kids, but he is still almost fourteen, and I am much older now. Brad never had a chance to grow up you see. I am sure our story is similar to a lot of stories, and perhaps Brad’s and my story is not any better than some stories people around you could tell you, if they chose to share with you.

When I was a child we lived out in the country, sort of. There were neighbors around us, and you saw a car going down the road once in a while, but not very often. The population of my school was a little over eight hundred at the time and that included kindergarten to grade twelve, so there weren’t a lot of us. Brad must have been the ripe old age of six or seven when he first started showing up at my house. Brad was the only boy to ever show up to play with me besides the much older boys who were interested in my sister. Being little and alone in the country, I was thrilled to have a play mate.

Except Brad was not all that good of a play mate. We would play sometimes, and have a lot of fun, though most times we would end up fighting, usually with me taking the worst of it, being smaller and younger. I did not know any better, and Brad was the only friend I had outside of school. My Dad always thought I should beat Brad up and be done with it, but I did not have it in me at that time. Bradley’s family was very different. Brad’s Mom was a rather stern woman with little to say other than correcting or berating Brad. Brad’s Dad was very quiet and serious. They both drank I knew, everyone I knew that was an adult drank, or almost everyone, so drinking was not unusal. Brad’s folks just did not seem to have fun when they drank, and that was unusual.

One summer day Brad was supposed to come over and play with me, just getting off of being grounded for a few weeks. My Mom received a phone call from a neighbor down the road. My Mom suddenly was all shook up, she told me Brad had been in an accident! We jumped in the car and took off down the road to a four way intersection about three-quarter’s of a mile away. There was Brad lying in the middle of the road, moaning, crying, and sort of calling for his Mother, all in all pretty scary looking. His Mom showed up and what she said to him, I would rather not say, but it was not nice.

According to the driver of the car that hit him, Brad was on his bicycle and raced right into the intersection. If Brad had been two seconds earlier or later, he would not have a broken arm, a broken leg, and some broken ribs. Brad spent five months that year in various casts. Brad had a repeat accident a few years later with another broken leg, smashed ribs, and two broken collar bones. Same thing, Brad was hit on bicycle crossing a highway, at the other end of the road from our houses.

Fast forward to three years later. Brad has no friends. Almost everyone near his age is scared of him, because he is so wild and scary. You didn’t know if Brad would want to talk, or hit you with his fist - or something worse. I remember Brad the last day of school that year. Brad was on his bicycle after school, riding through the small line of buses, yelling at kids and threatening them. He had red and blue finger paint on his face and a stick in his hand he was hitting people with as he rode by. He also had a trash can lid hanging off his back. The teachers and bus drivers chased him, but he just laughed and mocked them.

I no longer lived near Brad by then. Brad had spent some months away from his home for reasons I did not know about, so we were no longer that close. About three or four weeks later after school was out I was going to Brad’s funeral. Brad was killed on the same highway he had been hit on a few years earlier. This time there was no saving him. Brad has lost almost half of his face, and his rib cage was held up by wire as he lay in his coffin. His Mom told me both of his legs and one arm had been broken too.

I felt real bad about Brad when he was killed, I cried over him after I was finally alone. At the same time, I could not help but think that maybe this was as good as Brad was ever going to get in this lifetime?. Maybe it was for the best that Brad died at the ripe old age of thirteen and a half? I do not think about Brad now days as much as I used to. Life has a way about it in that it keeps moving onward presenting new obstacles. But when I see other children I think are being abused, or have been abused, I always think of Brad. I still wonder sometime if he is better off where ever he is now. I think for the time he lived in and the family he was a part of, he is better off, not that that makes it better.

Brad would be in a prison somewhere serving a life sentence, or worse if he were alive today. Maybe if Brad were born today, he would have had a chance at a better life, as times are so much different now than they were when we were kids. I would like to think so. I still miss Brad some times. Brad was not always a good friend, but he was my first and almost only friend all those years ago.

Comments (0) Oct 07 2007