Psycho Friends
Categories: When I was around 12-14 years old, I had a “friend” who was a pure psycho. Notice I put the word in quotation marks — I actually considered him a friend for about a year, and he considered me a friend for two or three years.
At first, we had fun together. He lived in my neighborhood, and we played some Star Wars action figures together, and played Atari together. He also introduced me to two of my favorite games: RISK and Dungeons & Dragons.
In RISK, he would always put a token on the corner of the game board and say it was his nuclear bomb. If I started winning the game, he’d “set it off” by hitting the corner and overturning the whole board, throwing pieces and cards all over the room. I could never win a game of RISK against him, and I gave up playing with him after about half a dozen tries.
In D&D, he was a power-mad Dungeon Master. If you aren’t familiar with D&D, I can’t describe the type to you. If you are familiar with D&D (or any role playing game), you probably already know the type.
Fortunately, I stopped playing either game with him, and I found other gamers with more self control and respect for others. The last time I ever went into his house alone, or really had any personal, solo contact with him, he chased me around his kitchen table with a butcher knife.
Yep, that’s right, my “friend” chased me with a big knife. Even at the time, I didn’t think he was really trying to cut me, but I did feel that if I didn’t show enough fear, and try to run from him, he probably would have hurt me just to get the reaction he wanted. He wanted me afraid of him right then, for reasons I couldn’t and can’t fathom. (Out of young stupidity, I didn’t tell my mom about that incident until about 20 years later.)
For the next couple of years, he spoke of me as a friend even though I really didn’t have much to do with him on a personal level. I had new and better and non-psycho friends with whom to hang out, talk about girls, and play games with (not necessarily in that order).
A few years later, a couple of my then friends met this old friend (two separate and unrelated encounters), and they related how they thought he was very strange. I graduated high school with this guy, and then he went into the navy. I can only hope the military discipline straightened him out, or maybe he’s sitting on death row somewhere.
Bullgrit
i believe i know who this is….
When I moved to a new neighborhood at around 10yrs old, I met a guy similar to the one you describe. At first, he was pretty cool and easy to get along with. We both like to build plastic models and play around with them. He even had an 8mm camera and one time I build a model of a B-17 that we filmed “flying” (thrown and filmed from a low angle), then filmed the crash scene (covered with model glue, sprinkled with .22 cal nailgun blanks and lit afire). He taught me some “interesting” skills like how to make a mini pipe bomb from a chapstick tube and the powder from shotgun shells. He had all kinds of ideas for stuff that we should never have been doing. He never went crazy on me, but I never got on his bad side either. He had an older brother who was a wrestler who was mean as hell and used to pick on him (and me if I was around). I think that’s what made him the way he was. His dad was never around (I don’t know if his parents were divorced or what. I never asked).
He moved away after about a year or so and I found new friends that were more “normal” – i.e. like to ride bikes and other normal kids stuff. I really think it was lucky for me. I never heard from or about him since, but I wonder if he or his brother ended up in prison. They really were a couple of thugs.