Day fourteen - Nowhere fast

This probably happened pretty much anywhere else in the world, but when the Rambo movies came along in the 80's, it took kid's imagination by a storm. I mean, every kid wanted to be Rambo : they wanted to have the physique, the guns, the look, the bad-assery... and the knife. And I wanted to have it too, but my parents never got me one. 

This prefaces a memory I have with some of the older kids that sometimes hung around where we played - these would be the kids that came all the way from across town, for reasons I cannot now recall. But there were maybe three or four of them, all of them older, taller, bigger. Sometimes they'd take us to their side of the town, which was basically just crossing a small bridge anyways, but sometimes we'd go the long way around and make our way through a particularly bushy area - my memory may be tricking me somewhat, but I do seem to remember us going through some sort of forested area, though I can't imagine exactly where it'd be. However, on one of those expeditions, so to speak, a bunch of them had these big Rambo knives - long blades, and serrated as well, with a compass on the pommel. A couple of our local kids had the same sort of knives - and the only thing my brother and me had that we could produce, boy oh boy, it just didn't make the grade. My dad had a knife, he called it his hunting knife, but it was positively tiny and antiquated compared to the ones those guys had. It was pointy, sure, but neither did it have any serration nor was it sharp - at all!

That was a weird bunch of kids, that one. I wouldn't say that they came from the wrong side of the tracks, not necessarily, because where we lived in it wasn't great all over. In a way, if anything, we were the wrong side of the tracks because ours was the oldest part of town, while theirs was the newest, and parts of it were still in construction. Their side of town even had our one and only theatre - more on that in the future! But for some reason, their side of town wasn't exactly seen with good eyes. My family always warned me about going there, as if something awful could happen. And while I never found it to be dangerous as such, I always found it to be pretty weird. I'm very certain that the first time I saw someone doing drugs was there... Near where one of the kids lived, you'd always see this sweet black van, with tinted windows, and it had these crazy paintings all over it, as if the paintings had come from 70's prog album covers. Maybe they did, who knows? Weirdly enough, I'm not sure if I saw an attempted homicide. One of the older kids had a lot of family problems, and one day his dad saw him with us, and just beat the crap out of him. He even picked up some rocks from the sidewalk, and hit his own son with them. Strange stuff.