Eric Cartman, Scott Tenorman, Hodgkin's, Pizza, and Crohn's Disease

The mixing of some bizarre memories....

There was a post today about Kamala Harris on another Sub Stack, which showed a scene that was one of the rare times I backed Eric Cartman in "South Park," having been a victim of bullies in school.

Scott Tenorman is an eighth grader in the cartoon series, who repeatedly humiliates and taunts Eric Cartman over pubic hairs, burning Cartman’s money, forcing him to sing and dance, “I’m a Little Piggy,” which Scott broadcasts on a big screen.

Cartman deftly arranges to have Scott’s parents go out to a farm to assist a horse, where they get shot by the farmer. Then Eric grinds the bodies into chili for his Chili Cook-Off. He also invites Scott’s favorite music group — “Radiohead,” I think — to visit South Park.

At the big cook-off, Scott thinks he’ll humiliate Eric further with a chili full of pubic hair. Instead, Scott eats chili cooked with his parents’ remains. As he’s agonizing over this, Radiohead shows up and berates him for being a “crybaby.”

The rest of the town is duly impressed by Eric’s ability to wreck the bully’s life, and that’s all for the bully. Boy, did I want to see that happen to a number of bullies from my youth.

One in particular.

John Rave -- I'm not afraid to use his name -- karate-kicked me home from Intermediate School 70 at 8th Avenue and 17th Street in Manhattan to my home at 7th Avenue and 13th Street on a Friday afternoon, while his entourage cheered him on.

He only stopped when I ran up to my father, standing in front of the family car, waiting for me, in tears. Dad ran after the bunch. He caught a grinning member of the entourage, and chewed the tween out. The kid stood there grinning. Then our whole family went off for the weekend, me in tears.

On Monday, Mom, Dad, and me went to school to confront John Rave. He was absent. The entourage was there. They sat grinning. Nothing the worthless assistant principal, Ralph J. Letizia, could do to them. He was a former bartender who became a teacher for the pension plan.

John Rave lived in Westbeth, the former Bell Labs industrial complex at Washington and Bethune Streets in the West Village, converted to ritzy artists' housing. Westbeth occupies a great place in American engineering history: it’s where that nutcase Shockley invented the transistor. Bell Labs set the record for most patents by a single organization with their work in that massive industrial pile.

It also has the last intact section of the legendary rail “High Line,” and you can take the occasional tour. To reach the section, you have to go through an apartment, out the window, down a ladder, and voila — you’re on the last piece of original one-block trackbed. The rest has been converted into a lovely walkway and garden from Gansevoort Street and Washington Street to 34th Street and 12th Avenue. Superb hike.

John Rave was diagnosed as a kid as suffering from Hodgkin’s Disease, and his response to it was to organize his pals into a little group of bullies that tormented younger kids and "f******."

This was in 1973, when Greenwich Village gays were still often stereotypes, and they were unable to fight back. However, John and his pals bounced a gay couple emerging from a gym, who were into leather and weight-lifting. These two guys had no tolerance for kids half their age punching them. They sent the entire group to St. Vincent's with "lacerations and abrasions" (the official police term for "cuts and bruises").

All except John Rave.

He saw his army being defeated, and did not "withdraw" from the battlefield like British troops and Royal Marines...he ran like hell, back to Westbeth. As my English military relatives would sneer at someone who fled the battle, “Wounded by his own balls of s*** as he ran.”

That was the end of his little gang, of course. He spent most of his time after that sitting in his darkened bedroom, listening to something called "Quadrophenia" and smoking marijuana.

When we met up again in high school, he started bullying me again. I complained to a more valuable assistant principal, Harold Lehrman, who yanked John Rave out of gym and told him, "You harass this student again, you're going to jail." John Rave did not want to go to jail. He knew he would then get introduced forcibly to sexual practices he claimed to despise.

"What's your problem?" Lehrman barked. "What did he do to you?"

"He took a swing at me in the eighth grade," John Rave said. I had. He'd been taunting me.

Lehrman was incensed. "EIGHTH GRADE? A DIFFERENT SCHOOL? GET OVER IT! YOU’RE NOT GOING TO PURSUE THIS VENDETTA FOR ANOTHER MINUTE!"

I apologized to John Rave for taking the swing at him and expressed sympathy over his Hodgkin's plight. I did not mention that my brother had Crohn's, and was taking it better.

He mumbled some assent, clearly sullen.

He was a sullen kid. In middle school, we had to read short stories and screenplays in “Scholastic Scope” magazine about teenagers bravely facing death from “Disease of the Week” movies, like “I Heard the Owl Call My Name,” “Eric,” and John Gunther’s tragic and brilliant “Death Be Not Proud,” in which his son, played by Robby Benson, defies brain cancer to get that high school diploma, and then die.

I didn’t understand why we read these gloomy screenplays…they seemed to show there was no hope in life. We’d all die of a “Disease of the Week,” most likely without a movie. I think they were supposed to inspire us to show courage and determination in the face of tragedy. Hmm…and what happens when the bomb drops on you?

However, John Rave did not show much courage or valor. He was a sullen bully. A mass of gloom, anger, and despair. He sat in class, arms folded, not contributing. When he showed up. His behavior didn’t say much for the screenplays. I would have preferred “A Man For All Seasons” anyway, about Sir Thomas More and his conscience, but that’s another issue.

Anyway, after Harold Lehrman threatened John Rave with jail, he never bothered me again. Years later, a mutual acquaintance told me that John Rave sent my family a pizza as a peace offering. I never saw it. Obviously it had arrived on an evening when our family went out for dinner, so the doorman and the delivery boy assumed it was a gag in poor taste.

Decades after that, when I was telling this story to my daughter, it hit me that because I'd never thanked John Rave for the pizza, I had missed an opportunity to "bury the hatchet," to use that dreadful phrase. He probably was steamed that I never thanked him.

It didn't matter. I remained afraid of him, even though he never spoke to me again. I was told that from his medications, he got as skinny as a PoW liberated from Japanese captivity, and that when he worked at some store, he was regularly ridiculed for his flesh-and-bones appearance, but didn’t karate-kick anyone back. If he was that skinny and weak, I suspect that if he tried out his “Kung Fu” moves on some hefty co-worker, that co-worker would have turned John Rave into a pretzel.

I'm told that he should be dead from Hodgkin's, now. I doubt it. The Bloated Yam is obese, but so stuffed with preservatives, he'll live to be 180. Hodgkin’s wiped out Mickey Mantle’s male relatives early, which made the Mick drink and party heavily. Mantle believed he would not live to age 50, so he was going to have the most fun possible. He was truly shocked when he kept on going, and even more so when it was his liver that got wrecked instead. “Don’t be like me,” the dying Mantle told fans from his Dallas hospital bed, wearing his 1995 All-Star Game ballcap. He was right.

With modern medication, I’m sure John Rave is still with us. Whether or not he learned that he should not be a bully, I don’t know. Sometimes I think people change, evolve, and do better, like Thom Brennaman.

After spouting a homophobic slur on the air during the first game of a Cincinnati Reds doubleheader, he was fired during the second game. He never returned to the Reds’ booth. However, he faced Cincinnati’s LGBTQ youth at a meeting arranged by a gay Cincy newscaster, and heard their depressing and horrific stories of peer abuse, being hurled out of their homes by their parents, and living in shelters. Devastated and shocked, Brennaman is now a member of the Board of Directors of Cincinnati’s LGBTQ organization. He’s serious about his work. And he never went back to broadcasting baseball.

But sometimes I think they just become parodies of themselves. The current Republican Presidential candidate is one. Marjorie Taylor-Greene is another. I won’t rehearse these examples.

Meanwhile, my brother's Crohn's did not prevent him from living a positive life...marriage...raising a daughter...traveling the world...going to Winter Olympics...Yankees season tickets...even riding in a balloon over France.

Recently, he got Stage Four Colon Cancer. He didn't let that turn him into a bully, either. He just retired on disability, started making ship models, playing with his pet kitten and tortoise, and says, "It is what it is." No karate-kicking enemies du jour.

As for John Rave....the last I looked, he was still living there with his mother. To this day, nearly 50 years later, I remain afraid to walk around Westbeth alone.