Fungus-faced Toad-sucker

One of my favorite films as a child, Six Pack starring Kenny Rogers, is being released on DVD next week. Yes, I have moved it to the top of my queue on Netflix.

My strongest memory of that movie was when one of the kids called another kid a "fungus-faced toad-sucker", which I thought, at the age of 8, was the most derogatory thing you could call someone. You were telling them their face resembled a spore-producing organism, and that they also sucked on toads.

Needless to say, I started using the phrase all the time.

In fact, one particular neighbor was known only as "Fungus Face". And yes, the name was appropriate. His face did resemble a yeasty, fungal infection. He was about 13 or 14 and plagued with severe acne. I had no idea who he was. But one Saturday afternoon, while my neighbor Tony and I were building a dam in the creek that ran through the woods behind his house, our paths crossed and the wheels of destiny were set in motion. It sparked a small neighborhood war, of which Tony and I became the chief instigators. Our encounter became "the shot heard 'round the neighborhood".

As we were splashing around in the creek, fashioning our make-shift dam out of rocks and mud and tree branches, laughing and having a grand time, we were beset upon by three teenagers on their BMX bikes. Their leader, soon to be dubbed "Fungus Face", pushed me into the creek and smacked Tony with a stick.

We had never seen these kids before. They weren't from our neighborhood. They were from the neighborhood that bordered the woods on the other side. But we had never encountered them, in our limited dealings with the kids from that neighborhood. They were foreigners. And they scared us.

Earlier, Tony and I had found a rusty oil drum which had been sawed in half to use in burning leaves in our neighbor's yard. We requisitioned it for use as a boat, to sail in the "lake" we were creating with our dammed-up creek. Our "lake" had a diameter of about 8 feet. Tony was in the middle of said "lake" floating in the oil drum when the BMX bandits had rolled up on us.

As I crawled the out of the creek after being thrown in it by the leader of the gang, I reached to help Tony out of the boat. My hand was smacked away by one of the other teens and everytime Tony tried to row closer to "shore" one of the teens would push him back to the middle of the "lake".

"What are you little shits doing out here?" Fungus Face asked.

"We're just, um, making a dam," I said.

"You can't do that unless you have permission. This is my property," he said.

"Nah-ah," I said. "These woods don't belong to anyone! They are the county's property." I was pretty certain of this information. I think I had actually asked my father once, "who owns the woods behind Tony's house?" And he had told me something about it belonging to the county and the surrounding properties only reaching back half-way.

So we were well within our rights, I believed, to conduct our mini-TVA projects.

Fungus Face and his goons disagreed. They hassled us for about 15 or 20 minutes, broke apart the dam we had constructed, threw our Huffy bikes into the creek and tossed mud at us repeatedly as we tried to retreat.

As Tony and I ran back to his house, I began to fill with rage. Whatever rage an 8-year old boy could muster, I called it all up.

"That fungus-faced toad-sucker!" I yelled to Tony. "We should do something!"

"What?"

"Let's fight them," I said.

"With what?" Tony asked.

"With everyone we know."

And thus began our day-long recruiting efforts.We figured we'd get a small band of kids from our neighborhood together and get them angry enough to fight the battle for us. I knew I wasn't much of a fighter, but after years of neighborhood "wars" involving tree-forts and slingshots and rotten walnut husks, I knew I had the mind of a general. I had always been able to gather and organize my forces, equip them with the proper weapons (sticks and stones), and lead them into battle with whoever we were fighting that day.

So we knew we had to get as many friends together as possible. These were teenagers we would be fighting. Our strength would be in our numbers. If we had a group of ten 8 and 9 year olds, I was sure we could take at least three 14 year olds.

We first recruited our friend Brian, who was a scrappy kid, always looking to wrestle or fight. You always knew when he was going to turn on you because he would begin chewing his tongue and his eyes would glaze over. If we were playing football or basketball and Brian sudddenly stared at you and began chewing his tongue, you knew you had made an illegal move. It was best to forfeit a few points in the game, lest you incur his full wrath. his hero was Ric Flair, in 1982 the star wrestler with the NWA, and Brian had mastered Flair's trademark move, the figure-four leg lock. We knew we wanted him on our side and it wasn't hard to convince him.

Brian went around the neighborhood with us recruiting others and his passion abut the upcoming fight was addictive. we had no problem getting people to join us.

No one knew who this Fungus Face kid was, but Tony and I painted him up to be an evil monster, threatening life in our secure little neighborhood as we knew it, unless we all banded together and did something about it. I was like William Randolf Hearst helping to start the Spanish American war. Remember the Maine, boys!

When we finally had about seven neighborhood guys, ranging in age from 6-12, we went back to the site of our encounter to see if we could find them.

As luck would have it they were still there, riding their bikes through the creek and splashing mud as they slammed their brakes. They were trying to see who could spray it further. If you haven't figured out by now, I really had some redneck moments in my childhood.

The group of us approached.

"Fungus Face! Fungus Face! Fungus Face!" I had the boys chanting.

Brian, who was all of four feet tall at the time, asked, "Which one of these nasal drips is Fungus Face?"

Whereas "fungus-face toad-sucker" had been my catch phrase that summer, Brian's favorite phrase was "nasal drip". He had heard it from his older brother and laughed for several days about it. As a matter of fact, he and I laughed about it at his wedding a couple years ago, when we were reminiscing about the old days.

I pointed to the leader of the group and he looked at Brian.

"What are you gonna do you little Monchichi?" he said. And then he swept his leg, knocking Brian's feet out from under him. The other teenagers laughed.

Brian jumped up and started punching the kid, but he just swept his legs out from under him again. The rest of us moved in. The other two teens goaded us on, then jumped at us. Several of the kids we'd brought scattered and ran into the woods.

We watched as Brian kept getting knocked to the ground.

Everytime we tried to move in, the other guys looked more threatening.

More of our "army" left as the minutes dragged on, until it was just Tony and I.

Brian kept getting thrown to te ground each time he stood up. he looked at us.

"Anytime guys," he said. "Feel free to jump in." he swung punchs but they never hit their target as Fungus Face held his head at arm's-length.

Then Tony and I sat down and watched.

Brian looked at us with a sense of defeat in his eyes. Here were the guys who'd provoked him into joining this fight, and they were sitting on their asses watching him get his ass kicked.

I felt gutless. But I didn't do anything. I sat there and watched my good friend get thrown around like a rag doll by a kid nearly twice his age. But Brian never gave up. He fought and fought, and laughed at us for getting him into this and then not joining in. He couldn't believe it.

Eventually the teens got tired of the game and left.

We helped Brian up and we all started walking home.

"Thanks for helping out," Brian said. "Who wanted to fight these guys again?"

Tony and I just shook our heads. But Brian wasn't mad at us. He'd fought a new enemy. The "Legendary Fungus Face". We'd hyped him pretty good. And no one else saw the outcome of the fight. As far as we were all concerned he'd won by default. The teenagers quit. He'd stayed in the ring until the end. Fighting.

And so that is how the story would be told in the weeks to come. As the mythology of Fungus face grew, the story of Brian's epic battle with him grew proportionately. We knew that's how the story would be handed down. We knew that from the moment we walked away from the woods on our way home and Brian turned to us both and said,

"Those guys were a lot bigger than you described them."