44 Chapters About 4 Men - BB Easton Page 0,2

off your arm and beat you with it if you so much as breathe the same air as me. Knight was so successful in his mission to intimidate that he remained a subgroup of one throughout high school.

I think his fury originated at birth when his dumbass disappointment of a mother named him Ronald McKnight. It was 1981, so knowing Candi, she was probably trying to impress the married stockbroker who had knocked her up by naming their lovechild after the only Republican she could think of. I guess—after years of being treated like a punching bag by Candi’s revolving door of abusive, alcoholic, probably married boyfriends; being treated like a burden by a woman who preferred the company of douche bags to her own son; and having to endure Ronald McDonald jokes every time he finally did get away—somewhere along the way, Ronald became Knight, and Knight became a holy fucking terror.

Knight dressed like a neo-Nazi and looked like an Aryan poster child. He had the boyish good looks and perma-scowl of Eminem—translucently fair skin, a quarter-inch of buzzed platinum-blond hair, and practically clear eyebrows and eyelashes. Knight’s ghostly colorless appearance was violently punctuated, however, by two piercing arctic-blue eyes. If it weren’t for those shockingly azure eyes and a smattering of light-brown freckles, he could easily have passed as Marshall Mathers’s albino twin brother.

Knight’s physique was scrawny but cut, like Bruce Lee. Like a street fighter. He took weight-training classes religiously (Seriously? Fucking public schools can’t find anything better to teach kids?), and once hustled three hundred dollars out of the football team by bench-pressing three hundred pounds. That was over twice his body weight at the time.

Whenever Knight told the story, he would always muse, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

Let me tell you, there was a whole lotta fight in Ronald McKnight—or as we liked to call him (never, ever to his face), Skeletor.

What was even more interesting than Knight being the only skinhead in town was that he wasn’t even a racist. I never once heard him tout any Aryan pride bullshit or saw him sport any of the typical Nazi regalia. Swastikas and iron crosses were suspiciously absent from his personal effects.

Ever the psychologist, even then, I became so fascinated by his lack of fascist iconography that I actually got up the nerve to ask him about it once.

Instead of thrusting his right arm into the air and launching into a Sieg Heil, Knight quickly glanced up and down the hallway to make sure no one was listening. Then, he leaned in so close that I could feel his serpentine breath on my neck and whispered, “I’m not really a racist. I just hate everybody.”

And I believed him. That motherfucker hated everybody.

Or so I thought.

There were five billion people on the planet in 1996. Ronald “Knight” McKnight hated four billion nine hundred ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of them. He hated his parents. He loathed his friends. He intentionally intimidated strangers. But, for some clandestine reason, Knight decided that he liked me. And being the only human the scariest boy in the universe liked was a heady thing.

When I first met Ronald McKnight I was a waifish, doe-eyed, freckle-faced freshman with a shoulder-length mop of wavy reddish-blonde hair and a devastating crush on the King of the Punks, Lance Hightower. I’d been cutting my hair shorter and shorter, adding more and more safety pins to my hoodie and backpack, and inching my way closer and closer to Lance at the elite punk-goth-druggie lunch table, which he’d presided over since the first day of school. (As it turned out, Lance was completely and hopelessly homosexual, something I wish I had known before shaving most of my hair off and getting multiple body piercings in my increasingly self-injurious effort to get him to make out with me.)

Knight, who was a sophomore at the time, had landed at the punk table by default. With no other skinheads to hang out with, the punks kind of adopted him as their rabid, mangy, evil pet rattlesnake. Day after day, he would sit at Lance’s table with his brow furrowed and his head down, gripping his fork hard enough to bend the metal and muttering the occasional, “Go fuck yourself,” whenever anyone would address him.

Well, one balmy day in late September, I happened to overhear some upperclassman at our lunch table say to