I’ve never really demonstrated leadership abilities. On job applications, I tend to play up my conscientiousness and ability to work independently. But there is one story that I guess I could tell, if someone asked whether I had ever motivated people in large groups.
I think, in this story, I am about eight. My friend, herein referred to as Tina, is six or seven. Her brother Paul, who will become all too relevant soon, is five. The three of us spent most of our time at the neighborhood park, where my father sat for hours reading while Tina and I held court over the playground we thought of as our own. Occasionally a soccer mom would ask him if he knew I was climbing up the top of the slide.
“Uh-huh,” he would say, looking up, vaguely annoyed.
*Aren’t you worried?” they’d ask.
And then he’d shake his head.
Similar things happened when I jumped off swings and walked across the monkey bars. Tina and I were probably the fastest girls at the park, and so we’d organize games of Cops and Robbers that rivaled the intensity of the any mafia antics documented in film.
All this to say: we were essentially unsupervised tornadoes of chaos, as is natural for elementary aged girls. But the biggest disaster we ever created happened one day when Paul was really getting under our skin.
Here is some context for Paul’s ability to do a tap dance on anyone’s last nerve. My mother, a patient woman who is all too forgiving, hated the kid. She said he was going to grow up to be an attorney, which was her most scathing insult.
Paul was a whiner, for starters. He was all too used to sniveling until he got what he wanted. If that didn’t work, he resorted to violence. He had walked up to a girl on the playground and belted her in the stomach for no reason once. He was never above pushing, shoving, slapping, and pinching. If he got caught, he pretended to cry, and usually his only consequences were being forced to say he was sorry, which he did with a shit-eating grin on his face and absolutely no remorse.
Once, his father was going to take me, Paul, and my parents out on their boat for an afternoon. While we were loading up, Paul threw a temper tantrum and refused to go, for reasons I can’t recall. This tantrum lasted the full three hours before his mother got home, so I suppose he had a damn good set of lungs going for him. As he carried on, beside their pool, and I attempted to reason with him by shouting that he was a little brat who ruined everything, Mr. B looked over at my parents and shrugged.
“I got some really good rum,” he said.
He probably did. MR B was an airline pilot who often traveled to South America.
“Given it to Paul,” my mother said.
Tina and her mother returned and Paul bee-lined for the door.
“Can we go to target and buy me a toy because I was good?” he asked.
But on the day in question, Paul wasn’t playing the saintly, hot-wheels-Car-deserving child. If I recall, he was bothering us for several hours straight (I think it may have involved interrupting our My Little Pony fashion show, but I’m not sure) when I snapped. Somehow, he had raised the ire of Small Eve beyond control.
There are few times I can remember being quite as livid as at the moment in my brain almost fused trying to think of a way to annihilate the snotty little brat before me. And so I screamed the first thing that came into my head.
“NO PAUL NO!”
It was an easy enough chant. Tina picked it up. Soon we were shouting “NO PAUL NO! NO PAUL NO!” in unison, and Paul began to scream cry. Never before had he suffered real consequences for his actions, let alone such a simple but powerful manifesto. This was entirely new to him, and he didn’t like it.
Tina’s father, Mr. B, hadn’t noticed yet.
Tina and I began to march around the park chanting “NO PAUL NO” and some of our friends began to follow us. When there were five of us in the little protest, I began asking anyone we passed “Hey, do you want to help us?”
To which most curious children replied “Sure!” and fell into step behind us. I am sure, left to our own devices a little longer, we would have created a barrier a la Les Mis and turned the chant into a song.
Paul was, at this point, was lying on the ground sobbing. Mr. B hurried over, curious, I am sure, as to what the ever-loving fuck was going on. Then he spotted the parade.
“Girls! Girls, you gotta stop,” he said, leaning down to the volcanic eruption that was Paul.
But we were not to be stopped. All around the slides and monkey bars we marched and chanted, kids we didn’t even know joining the fray.
“NO PAUL. NO! NO PAUL NO! NO PAUL. NO!”
My father was at this point doing his level best not to burst out laughing. Paul was laying on the ground crying and yelling at the same time. I had seen Paul fake-cry a hundred times but this here was the real deal. He was about to break the sound barrier. I have no idea what he was saying, as it was too garbled by wracking sobs.
It seemed we had touched a nerve.
Mr. B frantically shushed us. There was no hope of reasoning with Paul until the uprising had been quelled. After a few victory laps, we capitulated, because it was obvious: we had won.
Paul calmed down enough to start bothering us again, but one whisper of “No paul no!” and he would back off. Eventually, we packed up and went home, living to cause havoc another day.
You might assume from all of this that I grew up to be a Regina George. Thankfully, I was a quiet kid in high school, dressed in all black and filled with disdain. I did, however, circulate several obscene nicknames for the principal and run a rebel Facebook page with my friend Ginger, which directly opposed the school board.
None of these stories, unfortunately, can I bring up in job interviews, so I tend to say that I like working with people and have a real can-do attitude.
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Previously Published on evetaft.wordpress.com and is republished on Medium.
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