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Troll Bridge
Every town has the place—an abandoned building, an alleyway, a wooded area—where the ‘bad’ kids hang out. You know who I mean; the long hairs, metal heads, the druggies. It’s where these outsiders go to smoke cigarettes and listen to music. For us, it was the bridge over Boot Creek, the little stream that snaked through town. Boot Creek itself was rarely any more than a muddy ditch. But at the top of the bank there was an area where kids could hang out and make noise and ride their skateboards without the nosy gazes of adults.
My friends and I took to calling it, “Troll Bridge,” on account of it was occupied almost all the time by Billy Logan and his crew of pothead screwups. Billy was three years older than us but was only one grade ahead because he’d been held back twice. I was in the seventh grade and here was this giant, nearly fifteen-year-old bully running around terrorizing everyone. Don’t look so shocked. It was the eighties. Things were just like that. It was a different world then.
Anyway, Billy had grown this sort of scraggly goatee on his chin and my friend Chad made the remark that all that hanging out under the bridge was turning him into a Billy goat. My other friend Daniel pointed out that it had been the troll who lived under the bridge, not the goats. I agreed with Daniel, that Billy was much more like the troll than the goats. And after that, it was Troll Bridge, not Boot Creek, that we avoided as much as we could. (more…)