Fucking Asshole #3: Bill Lynch

Fucking Assholes, cont.

3. Bill Lynch (and the SRA Class of ’75)~ Our family moved from East Providence to Pawtucket, just one town over, as I was entering 8th grade. My parents decided that I would finish middle school at the same school I had been going to since 1st grade. Although this high school was in a different town, there were a couple of guys there I knew from middle school, but they weren’t necessarily guys I knew well. Although I had been living in the new town for almost a year, I did not know anyone in my neighborhood for two reasons. One was that I continued school at my old school for 8th grade. The other reason was that we were one of the very few Catholic families in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. So besides not seeing anyone from the neighborhood in school, neither did I get to know any of them through church related activities. I enter this new school with raw social skills, nearly zero athletic skills, and zero street smarts. I was at the bottom of the pecking order. I got picked on and was both verbally and physically abused. I was held upside down and nearly had my head forced into a toilet, but somehow found the strength to avoid that humiliation. Freshman year was the worst, but all four years sucked. Graduation day was probably one of the saddest days of my life, as evidenced by the look in my eyes in a photo taken of me and my folks that day. (If I ever find it, I’ll scan it and post it here.)

So why Bill Lynch? Lynch-Maciel. He sat right in front of me in freshman year and never missed an opportunity to give me a whack whenever Brother Andrew (another asshole) wasn’t looking. He is the one I remember, the ringleader. I have delightfully forgotten most of the details of the 4 years of abuse, but I haven’t forgotten how Lynch, Ed Dalton, Steve Ormerod, Tony Kaczmarek, Jim Bonin, Robert Sinotte, and several others made me feel then and now. Several years ago, I threw away my yearbooks. Garbage. A waste of four years. I’ve forgotten the names of the others who were part of this crew who terrorized not only me, but Mo Girard, Robert Halliday, and a few other misfits whose names escape me as well. Not everyone in the whole class was an asshole. Disqualified from that status would be Jim Savage, Mike Swiader, Pat Quinn, Tom Pontiatowski, Rick Hill, and Dennis Peloquin, among a couple of others. Like I said, I threw away the yearbooks and have forgotten much from that era.

Lynch, you beat the shit out of me psychologically. I’m sure some minor physical crap was beaten out of me, and while those scars are gone, the psychological ones remain. After four years of eating the shit you and your henchmen force fed me, I was not ready for college or the real world. I suffered injuries from which I have never fully recovered from. As I mentioned at the beginning of these ‘Fucking Asshole’ posts, I don’t dwell upon all the injustices I have been served by the assholes I’ve encountered in my lifetime. I don’t think of you. (Do you think of me?) But I read “The No Asshole Rule”, and lo and behold, when I venture to recall the assholes I’ve known, you come up at #3, even after all these years. All 33 of them.