We ran as dirt clogs fell from the sky, exploding on the ground around us, some of them finding their target causing red welts to appear as if by magic on each of us. We were running over each other when my cousin who we simply called “Boy” fell over a big bag of onions that one of my uncles had brought from a farmer on one of his trips through the back roads of Texas. It was a huge bag of onions, more onions than any person or family for that matter could ever eat in a lifetime, but we weren’t going to eat them. We had found a new weapon and once we modified them we would have a super-weapon

My cousin, “Boy” didn’t hurt himself when he fell over the bag of onions, but the red, mesh bag they were in split, spilling huge yellow onions across the carport. It was then that my cousin, Dorothy, who was the pretty one in our little group of misfits picked up an onion and threw it at JC. She may have been the pretty, girly one but boy could Dorothy throw. She could throw a ball like a boy and she could fight like one too. The onion splattered all over the floor in front of JC spraying him with onion juice and little pieces of onion some of which may have landed in his eyes because it looked like he had begun to cry. In all the years I had known him, I never saw JC cry until that day, so I imagine it was the onion juice that made him cry, but even so we still laughed. He rubbed his eyes and he cried harder - we laughed harder. I don’t know who actually came up with the idea for what we did next. I’d like to think that it was me because I like to think that I was and still am the misunderstood genius of the group, but I’m pretty sure that it was one of my other cousins who came up with the idea.

“You boys find the bottles and then do what you got to do.” Sara ordered as she pulled out a huge switch blade knife from her pocket. Now that I think back on it, it may not actually have been a huge switch blade knife but more like the little file thing that comes with a fingernail clipper. She picked up an onion and cut out a cap much like she was carving a pumpkin for Halloween.

We didn’t have to be told what to do, we knew what had to be done and we did it. We each took a bottle from my grandfather’s recycling can and went behind the big tree. We were bad but we still had our dignity. We weren’t going to show our penises to the girls, we were still too young for that. We pulled them out and began to piss into the bottles, each of us trying to fill them up. That was our little machismo way of determining who the Alpha male would be in the group since we were all pretty close in age.

“Have a Coke and a smile,” I said holding up my Coke bottle that was a little more than halfway filled with the warm yellow liquid. I smiled a little smile and I could feel the evil glint in my eye because I knew   what we were going to do next was bad and deep down I liked being bad. Hey, I’m the grandson of southern Baptist preacher – there is a bad streak in me.

We all laughed when “boy” filled his bottle and still had to pee. He peed into my grandmother’s rose bushes, that would be the thing that would later get us into more trouble than actually throwing piss filled onions at the enemy would.

“He’s full of piss.” My cousin Ruben said.

“That’s not all he’s filled with,” my cousin Patricia said. “He’s full of shit most of the time.”

We all laughed because at that point of our lives it was funny whenever anyone said the word “shit.”

The younger kids were tasked with the chore of filling the onions with the warm urine and putting the caps back on them to make sure nothing spilled until they found their target.

It was our turn to sacrifice one of our own. My little cousin Eddie walked out into my grandma’s yard and started prancing around on the ground singing at the top of his lungs:

“JC is gay
He throws like a girl
He fights like one too
And he cries like one, boo, hoo, hoo.”

When that didn’t work we sent out my cousin Velinda who had what called a “white girl” voice. We never told her she had a “white girl” voice and she probably never knew it either, until she reads this. What it means is that her voice would change when she talked to grown-ups or people in authority, so that to us she sounded more sarcastic, but the grown-ups thought it was cute. She pointed her butt toward JC’s house and taunted them in her White Girl voice:

“JC and Mark sitting in a tree
First comes love,
Then comes marriage
Then comes Japo in a baby carriage”

That worked. JC and Mark both came running out, their judgment clouded by anger. They didn’t even get close to my cousin Eddie or Dorothy because Sarah was waiting in the shadows for them. She stepped out and let loose with two piss filled onions. Mark got hit on the chest and JC got hit on the side of his face. If I live to be a hundred years old I will never forget the look of shock, anger, and humiliation on JC’s face. I have to admit that when I saw the look on JC’s face I felt bad. We had done something bad, something terribly bad, but it was war and people did terribly bad things in war.

 We weren’t the first and we wouldn’t be the last.