Super Boy Vs. Super Wimp

I was the oldest child in a family of four children. As a college freshman I was quite a bit shorter than I later turned out to be (after I graduated) at five foot nine inches tall. I was also quite light in weight, only weighing about 110 to 120 pounds at the time. My brother, 8 1/2 years younger than me, was quite an athlete in the small private school that he attended and was quite proud of his muscles and constantly teased me about my lack of muscles compared to his. He would embarrass me constantly by wrestling me in front of his friends or by sitting next to me in church in the sleeveless shirt and shorts, flexing his fairly sizable muscles whenever a girl happened to be looking his way (even as a 10 year old, he already had a way with girls!). Speaking of church, our whole family was attending a small country church that had a very large number of kids as a percentage of the total attendees. When we came to Sunday school, the kids would sit in rows organized by grades with the youngest kids sitting in front. I noticed the first Sunday that we were attending, that there was a boy in the third grade class that was head and shoulders taller than the other kids. I also noticed after a few Sunday’s that my muscular brother who was two grades higher than this third grader – would disappear whenever the unusually large kid showed up. Granted that this kid was 6 inches taller than my brother, but it I thought it was strange that my brother would be so afraid of a younger kid. So one day I asked my normally macho brother, why he ran away from this kid. My brother who normally was too proud to admit that anyone could be tougher or stronger than him said this to me, “It is because he is very strong and a bully; and you better watch out or he will beat you up too!” That statement made me curious for it was not characteristic of my brother to warn me of potentially embarrassing or hazardous situations as he loved to humiliate me… stories of him embarrassing me I will tell another time.
Our church Sunday school has an alternative Halloween party for kids to attend on a Saturday night as a way of attracting new kids/adults into the church. There were three haunted houses with the college group providing the fanciest one. I dressed myself up as Frankenstein using an old ugly suit of my father’s and I wore green makeup. Knowing that our church overheated when it was crowded, I wore underneath a pair of cut-off jeans and a ridiculously oversized muscle shirt (it made me look like the wimp that I was as the shoulder straps would not stay up on my bony shoulders).
During the party I saw this huge third grader dressed up as superman, wearing a tight pair of blue leotards, a red oversized cape and a floppy yellow S pinned to his chest. I also noticed later on from a distance, this kid flexing his bicep in front of group of mostly older kids who seemed to be admiring its proportions. Wearing contacts at the time, I didn’t see very well and I at first wondered how he inserted the large artificial muscle into his outfit…thinking that he had a bulb connected to balloon to make a fake muscle. His muscle to me looked too big to be real, especially on an seven or eight year old kid.
Later, at the end of the party, I was told to be in charge of watching the remains of the haunted house that had been set up by the college group (we had borrowed some Victorian furniture and black lights which at that time were fairly valuable). It had been predetermined that the other, more stronger guys would help move chairs and furniture back in place so that church could be held the next day in the auditorium. Accepting this menial assignment, I had removed my outfit and my makeup and was in my ridiculous looking muscle shirt and shorts while revealed my extraordinarily skinny and yet flabby body. My physic was in such a way that when someone asked me to flex my bicep, though I was painfully skinny, the thin layer of flab completely concealed it! The large third grader still in his Superman outfit wandered into the room where the haunted house had been and seeing me in my scrawniness said sneeringly, “Watch me as I capture the monster!” I laughed thinking he was not serious.
While I was distracted by some kids running on some very low chairs, the large boy had removed the red cape that had concealed most of his body, leaving him only wearing the blue leotard. He had snuck up behind me, hopped up on a short preschool sized chair and then grabbed me around the lower chest – trapping my arms that were at the side at the time. He said quietly to me, “You better cry ‘Uncle’ or I will crush you to death!”
It must have been quite a sight as there were at least 20 kids in the room of various ages watching the spectacle of a very large, muscular yet young kid man-handling a puny college student. I am not exactly certain as to how much he weighed…but it had to have been at least 40 or 50 pounds more than I did! He was quite tall and was at most 6 inches shorter than I was. The blue leotard outfit he was wearing, left him virtually naked in a sense as it revealed every fine striation of muscle that he had from head to toe with him having extraordinarily large shoulders for any age (his deltoid-caps seemed like very large grapefruits). His thighs were equally impressive with muscular bulges resembling giant biceps and approaching volleyballs in size. And perhaps most impressive of all were his buttocks, as they resembled a couple of basketballs in size, tightly held together with tremendous definition and striation. Apparently he had developed such muscularity by working on his dad’s farm, lifting over one hundred pound bales of hay, on a daily basis, onto the back of a flat bed truck ( I found this out later).
Well in any case, this kid did make me cry ‘uncle’ several times by crushing me with his relatively massive, encircling arms. I was completely helpless as he was vastly stronger. At one point he did squeeze me as hard as he could, but fortunately he had dropped his grip around my waist at that point causing me to momentarily to lose all circulation to my lower extremities - he would have certainly killed me if he had done that to my chest! He then tossed me over one of his broad shoulders and was going to carry me out to the front yard to beat me up when his dad intercepted and rescued me and admonished his son for bullying. This kid intimidated me a couple of times after this episode; but wasn’t really that much of a problem in my perspective as I had long gotten used to being bullied by much younger kids for quite some time because of my scrawny physic.
A postscript: there was a new, obnoxious guy in our college group at church who was proud of his unusually large biceps which he had obviously obtained by working out with weights. He was 24 years old and a sheet metal worker by trade. He also was fairly tall at 6 foot 2 inches in height and 180 pounds in weight, and his biceps were very impressive in size, but I noticed that his wrists were in reality only slightly larger than mine-this I attribute to improper weight training. During a break, on a Wednesday church meeting night we where were goofing off as a group of guys, with some of us arm wrestling, or just wrestling around. No one in the group wanted to arm wrestle this guy as he out-weighed the next heaviest guy by about 30 pounds… so this arrogant guy mocked us and kept on challenging us to arm wrestle him. Suddenly I had a brainwave. I remembered that this huge kid happened to be in another meeting room in the church and being after 9pm, I knew that he would be coming out of class about this time. Thinking of his extraordinary strength, I suggested to the man (without telling him the age of his would be opponent) that there was an unusually strong kid in the Sunday school program that would be a more worthy opponent than any of us. All of us except for this man who did not know the kid, knew of whom I was talking about (the big third grader) and I could see some quiet, knowing smiles among the group. I brought this kid into the room, found a suitable table and had them sit across from each other to arm wrestle. It was immediately apparent that the young kid had a wrist that was close to being twice as thick as the older guys and a bicep that was at least as large. And although he was somewhat shorter in overall height, his arms on the other hand were just as long. It would be improper to describe the arm wrestle as an epic struggle for it was not! When the word “go” was said, the boy slammed the man’s arm down in maybe a second. The man was so stunned --especially being beaten by an obviously quite a bit younger kid—that he in an incredulous tone demanded a rematch. The second rematch was over in a blink of an eye. Someone suggested that maybe he should try the left arm instead (the kid actually was left-handed and was even stronger in that arm). The formerly macho man placed his left arm against the boys and we told the boy, “let him have a head start.” The man struggled against the boy quivering his own arm but not the boys. When we said a second “GO”, the boy again slammed the man’s hand to the table. The man amazed and yet amused at the disparity between their strength then arm wrestled the boy with two arms against the boy’s one…just for the fun of it. The kid again defeated the man, perhaps because their weights weren’t really that much apart and because that time the man was truly exhausted. Someone suggested that maybe the man would like to wrestle the boy instead on the grass. But the sheet metal worker claiming that he had injured his arm, and had enough of any kind of wrestling. He left the room (we never saw him again in any of our meetings!).