At Riverside Military Academy, in Gainesville, Georgia, in about 1990, there was a student named Nathan Scott. Nathan Scott had the biggest mouth in D company. He was a black guy who liked to fight, and he liked to talk about how he liked to fight. I remember him saying that "I like to fight in Nikes." He got in a fight over not much with another student whose last name was Cherico, and Scott kicked his ass. Not too bad, though. Word got around about this, there was normally a fight or two a week that made gossip headlines, and eventually this guy named Dave Wilbanks heard about it.
Dave Wilbanks was the toughest guy in school. Out of 500+ "cadets", he was the one who would destroy any of the other ones. It was rumored that he was on steroids and was prone to flying off the handle. Dave Wilbanks was also a "white power" guy. He made this symbol
all over the place. If there was dust on a table, he would trace it with his finger. To us the circle with the line through it meant Dave Wilbanks. To the rest of the world it means "white power".
Once Dave heard about this big black guy beating up a smaller white guy over something small and then talking about it, he put a bandana on over his shaved head (of course it was shaved) and went from B company over to D company, and found Nathan Scott.
What happened next varied depending on who you talked to, but there was no doubt people would have skipped lunch for a week for a ticket. It was an ass-beating like only a few others we had that year. A guy would die in one of them. His name was Flanagan.
But back to Scott's demise. Tables and chairs were turned into kindling, there was no doubt of this. (There's always a period during which people survey the evidence and recreate events in their minds' eye. That's when you have to show up if you want to know what happened. That's what the CNN newscrews are are always doing on the scene making noise, but CNN is always bigger than the story, so everything gets messed up.) Some people said that Dave smashed them over Scott's head or body, but I think most of the things that were smashed were smashed by Nathan Scott's body flying through them. Dave was a big guy among big guys. After whatever it was that happened, Scott's eyes were swollen shut and one arm was in a sling, and Dave got in trouble. Not too much, trouble, though. Scott had it coming. Had he known how hard he was going to get his ass beat, he would have quieted down earlier, but too late. Justice was served, in its own weird way.
Later in the year, I moved from company D to company B. Some kids named Rojas from Panama (who I trounced the next year, satisfyingly), and Berenger, a Cuban, were messing with me in my sleep and I had no recourse but to move to a different company. When I got to B company, I was on Dave Wilbanks's hall.
Incidentally, there was a kid there named Seth Ramsbottom, who was a known fighter, but wouldn't you be, too, if your name was Ramsbottom?
More about me:
In West Philadelphia born and raised, on the playground is where I spent most of my days. Chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool and shootin' some B-ball outside of the school. Then a couple of guys who were up to no good, started making trouble in my neighborhood. As you can imagine, I was disturbed. I got in one little fight and my mom got scared; she said "you're moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air".
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