"So You Think You’re a Gangster?"
In my mid to late teens, I lived in Pollok. I called it the Barracuda Triangle due to its dangers. Three gangs marked the corners, The Paka, the Crew, and the Bundy. One afternoon, as I was walking home, a boy a year or so older came up to me and said, “So you think you’re a gangster?” Then, without warning, he head-butted me.
An old woman passing by muttered in a mocking tone, “Did you see stars, son?”
That was the climate of the 1970s in Glasgow: senseless violence, carried along by the stories and books that seemed to glorify toughness and brutality.
I was doubly an outsider. Having moved there from Govan, I found myself no longer accepted by the very boys I had grown up with. To them, I had crossed a line; I was suddenly the enemy. Between a rock and a hard place, I kept my head down as best I could.
I’ve been thinking about those days recently. One morning a few months after I was attacked, I was on the bus to school, someone slid into the seat beside me. It was the same boy who had head-butted me, but he didn’t recognize me. He told me he was heading to the Govan Juvenile Court to face a charges for some missdemeanor. He was alone. No parent, no friend, just a youth carrying the weight of what he had done alone to the court for sentencing.
Strangely, I felt no hatred toward him. What I felt instead was sorrow. Perhaps he had been more victim than villain—neglected at home, unloved, and so forced to wear the mask of hardness. Maybe the swagger of a “hard man” was the only way he knew to be seen, to be acknowledged. I will never know the truth of his story.
What I do know is that he was sentenced into a young offender’s institution. His life branched off in a direction I never followed. I don’t know where he ended up, or whether he found peace, but I think of him still—not with resentment, but with compassion.
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." — attributed to Plato
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