A Lost Friendship and a Lifelong Lesson

Poor Sonny Joiner had no dad. He was the same age as I was, and I always really liked him. He was one of those little kids who was always giggling. Everything was a surprise to him. I guess maybe because he had so little in his life. (There’s a picture of Sonny in the camp picture in Bob’s chapter. Sonny is just on the right side of the gate.) He lived in a tiny house with his working mom on Fortieth Street, next door to the Smiths, another family without a father. It was suspected that Sonny was a Peeping Tom. Mind you, I never witnessed this and could never believe it. The girls swore they saw him watching them through the window as they took a bath. They may have only imagined this. If he did so, it was from a distance, because standing close to the house, the clear part of the window is too high to peer into. When the girls told Dad about this, he told them to yell if they caught him doing it again and he’d catch him and give him a lickin’. (Dad was a very fast runner.) One evening (it had to be in the late fall because the gardens were down) at about twilight, Dad was away and one of the girls was taking a bath. Whoever it was (probably Carol) yelled that Sonny was peeping again. I ran out, and sure enough, there he was, running away. At age twelve or thirteen, I was a very fast runner, too, and caught up with him near Britz’s barbed-wire fence. I grabbed him and pushed him to the ground. He went into a fetal defense position with his back up against a fence post. As I started pounding him in the shoulder, I was aware of his breath, both the heat and smell of it. This was the first time I had ever struck anyone in anger. I said nothing and he didn’t seem to resist. He just cowered and started to cry. I instantly felt terrible and was overwhelmingly filled with the most awful remorse. I stopped hitting him and got up. I have a vague recollection of someone urging me to hit him in the face, but I can’t remember exactly who that was, I don’t think it was Bobby. Maybe Billy Johnson or Ray Rohrer. But I didn’t hit him in the face. I let him get up and he sort of just slithered off along the fence toward his home. A few days later, when we were playing Kick The Can at Roger, Gano, and Stevie Smith’s house, Sonny’s mother came to the fence and told me something that will forever haunt me. She told me that the very day I had chased and punched Sonny, he had had an operation on an undescended testicle and that he had fresh stitches down there. She said I could have really hurt him. I did not answer her, because, of course, in those days you didn’t answer back to adults. I don’t know if she ever found out about his peeping, but I never struck another soul in my life. I missed his friendship, which was naturally lost.