CV Rick

Growing Up Mormon - Sunday School Retard - Part Two

For the entire story, click the Bankrobber topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

For several weeks everything went fine. Robert would come to Sacrament Meeting with his family and then leave to go home and issue traffic tickets to passing pedestrians and yell, “Breaker, Breaker” to speeding cars.

That didn't last because Robert's mother felt that he needed as much exposure to his “friends” and to the spirit of the Lord as he could get.  That meant he was to come back into our classroom.  The Bishop was convinced and Brother Stewart was convinced and so he returned.  I remember telling my father that I wasn't comfortable with Robert returning to our class, especially with a teacher who couldn't stop him.  My father told me that the Bishop's decision was made with careful prayer and that we'd be protected in the House of the Lord.  Blaine hadn't been protected. My father said that was because that he was being irreverent and disrespectful when he got hurt.  The message:  God allows retarded giants to beat up adolescent boys in church.

We entered Sunday School quickly, rushing to take seats away from Robert.  If you ask a psychologist, that might not have been the proper behavior but we were kids, what do you expect?  I didn't talk to him because I wasn't sure what would set him off.  Some of the others, like John, Terry, and Lisa said hi and he answered, “Breaker One-Nine” to each of them.

Growing Up Mormon - Sunday School Retard - Part One

For the entire story, click the Bankrobber topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

Robert was retarded.  I know I'm supposed to say he was mentally challenged or that he was special, but I'm not very P.C. and the fact of the matter was that he was retarded.  He was mentally and emotionally developed to the level of a three or four year old with a speech impediment, yet this underdeveloped brain was trapped in the body of an 18 year old man. I say man because he was big, over six feet tall, strong like an athlete: rock hard, no body fat. 

Traffic was his enemy.  During the week he'd stand on the sidewalk and yell at passing cars, pretending to talk into a microphone at his shoulder.  “Breaker One-Nine,” he'd say over and over again.  It was all he could remember from television.  When someone walked by he'd cite them for offenses imagined by pretending to write on a ticket book and then slamming his hand into their shoulder as if to pin it on them.  He'd exclaim, “Ticket,” and send you on your way.

On Sundays he was in church.  Sacrament meetings with his Mother and Father, Brother and Sister Green, but Sunday School with us in the 15 to 16 year-old class.  It was a class of eight kids, four boys and four girls. 

We didn't want him there.  To be a teenager was to be cruel, but not wanting Robert to be in our class wasn't a matter of cruelty, it was fear.  We were afraid of a man-sized boy who had no capacity to control his temper.  We were afraid of his fists and his outbursts.