She Gave Him the Beating He Deserved

By Eric Rozenman (March 2026)

 

“I was the only girl in my school to beat up a boy,” Sandy Sugarman was saying. “Even if he was a cripple. Today, of course, we would say disabled, or, maybe ‘differently abled.’ But he deserved it.” She paused, ran her fingers through elegantly coiffed brown hair—“Ravishing Chestnut, by Revlon,” she had confided the previous time we lunched together, a year earlier. “Boy, did he deserve it. Even the widow Bragg, who lived next door in a frame house with peeling paint—we kids whispered that she was a witch—agreed.

“Otherwise, life in Crossroads, Georgia …”

“Crossroads?” I quizzed.

“Yes, that really was the name. And it was kind of idyllic.” For a moment, her voice grew wistful. “Growing up in a small university town in the South in the early ’60s. What can I say? Those days are gone, even if the places remain. ”

We took our time finishing dessert, cheesecake straight from New York. Our table was one of half-a-dozen occupying what used to be on-street parking spaces in front of Clyde’s of Georgetown. The District of Columbia suffered chronic traffic management issues and café patios spilling off sidewalks into the streets, not to mention into lightly used bicycle lanes amounted to self-inflicted wounds.

Sandy had been, in order, a drama major—“with my accent, a natural as Blanche in ‘Streetcar Named Desire’”—congressional aide, lawyer and now documentary film-maker. We both arrived in Washington in our late twenties and found ourselves working for the same newly-elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She was a legislative assistant for military matters and veterans’ affairs. Her work-load was heavy; we had a big base in our district and a lot of military retirees. I, a newspaper reporter with all of seven years’ experience, weekly and daily, groped my way into the role of press secretary. I once scored a coup: TIME magazine interviewed our boss about his quixotic effort to end the tobacco subsidy. But it misidentified his party affiliation and misspelled my name.

That had been forty years earlier. Two years on the Hill struck both of us as just about enough and at the start of our boss’ second term—he had won his first race by two percent, reelection by one percent, leaving discomfiting handwriting on the wall—we went our separate ways. But like so many newcomers who succumbed to Potomac fever, we never left D.C. After law school, Sandy went to work for a Jewish civil rights organization, eventually becoming deputy director. “Until, one day, years late, I realized, ‘this is not helping,’ and started making documentaries.” One, on the Major League Baseball player and World War II and Cold War spy Moe Berg, received an Oscar nomination.

As staffers we had laughed at the same office foul-ups, disparaged the same difficult colleagues, and usually agreed on what actions our boss should take, even when he and the chief of staff did not. So, through marriages, children, new jobs, divorces, remarriages and loss of parents we had stayed in touch, meeting for lunch once every year or two, catching up and attempting to foresee the future. Unlike our old boss the congressman, and all of our former staff colleagues, we were smalltown Jews. We saw the world refracted through the same relatively rare prism. Maybe a more revealing one.

Traffic inched past on M Street on the other side of a cement Jersey wall. On the sidewalk grown men in angry T-shirts, tattoos, drooping cargo pants and running shoes, women in yoga pants and sports bras paraded past.

“Underwear,” I said.

“As outerwear,” Sandy added. “The less people value fertility, the more they flaunt sexuality.”

“Profound,” I replied. And then one genuine Georgetown cover girl strode by. Her expression said she would not have been surprised to learn that Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onasis once walked this very block. Blonde hair brushed her shoulders. An ankle-length knit gold dress clung to a figure cameras adored. Accents included low-heeled pumps, also gold, big sunglasses and a short gold necklace. Above her left hand, sun glinted off gems set in a narrow bracelet. Her right hand carried a shopping bag from Sezane’s. The only thing missing was a black leather leash ending in a large Dalmatian.

 

Idyllic and armed

In all, a fine late summer day just a long walk from the White House. An umbrella shaded our table. “Idyllic,” Sandy was saying, “except of course, for that time one of our neighbors, an officer on the local police force, lent my father a revolver until the business with the Klan blew over. Which it did.

“Our neighborhood was like a little Levittown, all these two-bedroom, one-bathroom houses—cottages, to be honest—thrown up right after World War II. Ours was practically a palace; we had three bedrooms, one for my parents, one for my two brothers and the smallest one for me. Still just one bathroom, of course. Some mornings there were bathroom traffic jams, especially during school days. My older brother took longer in there than I did, first with his ‘Elvis’ hair, then with his ‘Beatles’ hair. Me, I was something of a tomboy. In and out faster than Mom could say ‘Shampoo?’

“All the back yards ended at the back yards of the houses just behind, and the side yards basically merged one into the next except for the little driveways from the street to the one-car garages at the side of each house. No fences between the properties, kids in practically every house, and it seemed like we were outside playing all the time. Unless, of course, it was raining or we were in school. But at school there was morning recess and afternoon recess, so we were outside then a lot too.

“How did my parents, two Jews from New York City, end up in Crossroads, Georgia? Well, Dad had been wounded in World War II, credited a medic with saving his life, and decided he wanted to become a doctor. Mom had just graduated from college with a degree in fine arts. She was a good illustrator and pretty fair painter. Dad got admitted to medical school in Georgia and the local school district hired Mom as an art teacher, so they moved to Dixie and we never left. Dad finished as a professor in bio-medical research and Mom eventually worked—part-time of course, there were the three of us kids to raise—as what today we’d call a graphic designer for university publications. Eventually, they bought 30 acres outside of town and built their dream house in a meadow surrounded by woods. I felt lonely out there sometimes, which I never did in town, but by then I was nearly out of high school and glad of it. My friends, other pretend beatniks, once voted me ‘Prettiest Girl Not Elected to Homecoming Court.’

“The one thing I remember about growing up as a very young child that was not, you might say, seen through rose-colored glasses was polio. It was scary, the word itself and the dread it inspired. It was somehow associated in our minds with summer, especially with water and swimming. Now what does a child, especially in the South, want to do in summertime as soon as school is out? Right, jump in the nearest little body of water. Except that there was this ominous bogeyman—potentially paralyzing, possibly even deadly—lurking out there to grab you.

“And this wasn’t just a figment of our seven-year-old imaginations. There was the example of Tommy Heinrich before us practically every day. Tommy was my older brother’s age, and he actually had polio. As a result, he wore those heavy chrome metal-and-leather braces on his legs, from the ankles to above the knees. The braces fit into heavy-looking shoes. So, when Tommy walked in the school hallway, you could hear him kind of throwing one leg out in front of the other, clomping along toward you—sort of Frankenstein’s monster effect—or, to your relief, away from you.

“I heard Mom whisper to Mildred Hoy, a next-door neighbor, once that right after he came down with polio, Tommy spent time in an iron lung to help his breathing and his parents didn’t know if he would live or die. Well, he lived, which ultimately forced me one day to teach him right from wrong. We had those categories then.

“Let’s see, when was it? Yes, at some point during second grade it was announced over the intercom one morning that we were all to line up outside the school nurse’s office to receive the polio shot, the new Salk vaccine. Some of the kids were scared—afraid of the needle—even some boys, but I was excited. No more polio to worry about. No more nightmares of ending up like Tommy Heinrich. Getting a shot of penicillin at the doctor’s office for a sore throat had never bothered me, so why would this? I could hardly wait to get to the front of the line for my polio vaccination. I remember a teacher, not mine but Mrs. Pettigrew, the rather austere-looking fifth grade teacher ordering me to ‘stop prancing around.’

“Well, we all got our shots. And, amazingly that great, haunting dread of polio just slid out of our consciousness. Sort of how the dread of the invisible, omnipresent Covid-19 virus faded as soon as the vaccines became available back in 2021 or whenever. Anyway, it was two years later—I was nine and in fourth grade—I convinced my parents to let me get a rabbit for a pet. They had tried to dissuade me, explained that a dog or cat would be ‘more practical,’ but is there any word more irrelevant, more irritating to a child than ‘practical?’ I’d seen the blue ribbon-winning rabbit in the pet competition at the Clarke County fair that summer, and was bound and determined I’d get a pet rabbit. Mom and Dad finally gave in to my incessant imploring, and I got a white rabbit, which in a fit of non-creativity I named ‘Fluffy.’ Dad even built a little house and wire-enclosed pen for Fluffy in the backyard, just off the kitchen door.

 

So small a thing

“I loved that rabbit, not that it responded to my attentions like a loyal, always happy-to-see-you dog would, or even tolerate with mild appreciation being petted like a cat might. I made sure it had fresh lettuce, carrots and apples, new water and a clean cage every day. I watched over Fluffy like a mother hen over chicks, to coin a phrase.

“So, one day I hear a noise in the back yard. Looking out my bedroom window, I see Tommy Heinrich kicking down Fluffy’s pen, swinging his twisted right leg, in its heavy brace with the thick shoe at the bottom, as if it were an upside-down sledgehammer. By the time I dashed through the kitchen and out the back door, there’s Tommy kicking at Fluffy, trying to stomp on her. I literally throw myself at him, knocking him over. Now he’s lying flat on his back, moaning and I’m sitting on him, beating his face and shoulders, over and over, with my balled up little fists.

“ ‘Ugh! Get off me! I can’t breathe,’ he’s saying. I keep hitting him. I’m yelling, ‘You bully! You awful boy! I wish you had died!”

“This goes on forever, it seems, but probably no more than a minute or so. My mother and Mildred Hoy pull me off Tommy. Then they help him get up and I see blood dripping from his nose.

“‘Go home, young man,’ my mother says to him. And in this voice that sounds like it came up from a deep, dark, cold place, a voice I’d never heard from her before that scared me probably as much as it did him, she adds, ‘And don’t let me see you on our property again.’

“Then she looks at me and asks, ‘Are you alright, Sandy?’ I’m actually kind of dazed at this point and don’t say anything.

‘Her knuckles are bleeding,’ Mrs. Hoy says, holding my hands. ‘Let’s go inside and wash you off.’ We do and Mom puts some Unguentine ointment—remember that?—on my knuckles, then we all sit down at the kitchen table. They have coffee and Mom gives me chocolate milk and chocolate chip cookies, a treat which I understand immediately as a kind of reward. Neither of them says a word about my beating up a crippled boy. Life lesson learned: If someone hits you, or kicks your pet rabbit, hit him back hard.”

“Not everyone learns that lesson,” I said, “not in our therapeutic age. Which reminds me, what about your father and the Klan?”

“Oh, that,” Sandy says. “That happened when the university was being integrated. I wasn’t even in school then. My father and some other young faculty members sent a letter to university administrators urging them stand firm in admitting black students, regardless of protests by the White Citizens’ Council, which basically was the Ku Klux Klan in jackets and ties. Well, the local newspaper published the letter, complete with the signers’ names and addresses.

“Soon after we started getting threatening phone calls from people saying they were from the Klan and Dad better watch his back. He tried to shrug it off, but a couple days later the policeman who lived a few houses away came by. People talk about diversity today but our neighborhood was really diverse, Jews, Catholics, Baptists and practically every other kind of Protestant, professors, cops, teachers, store owners, insurance salesmen, the local barber. All kinds. But almost all the men were veterans and almost all the families middle class or on their way to it. Anyway, the cop hands my father what I later learned was a snub-nosed .38 revolver and says, ‘You can give this back to me when everything calms down.’ So, for some weeks we had that gun in the house.

 

Adrift

“Dad said to Mom, ‘Don’t worry. I carried a bigger sidearm than this in the war. I won’t hurt myself with it.’ She said, ‘I’m not worried about you so much as the rest of us.’ The threatening phone calls tapered off after a while and Dad gave the gun back. At least I think he did. Anyway, I never saw it again.

“What about you? Sandy asked. “I suppose there were idyllic moments growing up in the only Jewish family in Napoleon, Ohio?”

“In retrospect, definitely. Once, about eighth grade, Dave McIlhenny and I took his twelve-foot boat with its 10-horsepower Evinrude and sailed down the Maumee River to Waterville, a village upstream from Toledo. Our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bottles of 7-Up by then long gone—it was nearly 10 miles each way—we tied up at a little dock, walked up the river bank into town and had burgers and fries at a lunch counter. We were feeling pretty proud of ourselves, independent 13-year-olds, sort of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn with an outboard motor. Of course, no one heard of sunblock back then, so by the time we got home we were beet red and spent the next week painfully peeling burnt skin. Speaking of Unguentine, that’s how our parents learned of our little journey.

“Then there was the time the next year, ninth grade, I gave Kathy Wesche a ride on my new Sears moped. I was about an inch over five feet, maybe 110 pounds. Kathy was maybe five-four and already filled out. So, with her behind me it was hard to keep the front wheel on the pavement, let alone steer. And I hadn’t yet got the hang of shifting between first and second, the only two gears. So, we stalled a lot. Embarrassing! But her squeezing against me to hold on? Thrilling!

“Such idylls, however, were nicely balanced by getting beaten up twice, once by two classmates, once by three punks I barely knew, though in a town of 5,000 people, you sort of recognized if not knew everyone. My offense both times was blurting out the truth. The first time the offending truth was that one classmate’s brother was a juvenile delinquent, the second that these punks, loners no one else liked, had never played junior varsity football no matter what they said. Good preparation for journalism and its side effects.

“But I did feel at home in Napoleon. For example, my father was nominated, against his will, and elected to the local school board. Finding the word ‘Kike’ soaped on the window of my ridiculously turbo-charged Corvair Spyder convertible one Halloween in high school—I’d never heard the word until then—seemed like an aberration.”

“Corvair convertible. What would Ralph Nader have said? Reminds me of another unreliable car story,” Sandy said. “It’s October, 1973 and I’m driving home from Atlanta. I’d graduated from college that spring, major in drama, minor in political science and was trying to figure out what to do with my life. Go to Hollywood or go to Washington? As it happened, I started working in the district office of our local congressman answering phones and taking messages. This combined theater and politics; hardly a day passed that we didn’t have to handle some drama or other.

“Anyway, I’m driving back after breaking up with that summer’s boyfriend and get a flat tire on my white, 1971 Gremlin. Everyone else laughed at the Gremlin in those days, and not without reason, but I loved that stubby little car. Of course, I named it ‘Fluffy II.’ So, I limp along on the flat until I see a gas station. You don’t have to believe me, but it looked like something straight out of the movie Deliverance. Rickety wooden building on a gravel lot, two gas pumps in front, a faded Coca-Cola sign dangling at the side, and two good old boys, one in mechanic’s overalls, the other spitting chewing tobacco juice, standing by the door.

“‘Sure, little lady. I’ll change your tire,’ the one in the overalls says. ‘Be five dollars.’ ‘Great,’ I say, lighting a cigarette and pacing back and forth. The other one, the tobacco chewer, is leafing through a copy of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He points to a headline about the Yom Kippur War and says to the one changing my tire, ‘One thing about those Israelites: You hit ‘em and they hit you back. Not like the Jew-boys around here.’

“That’s when I thought once more about Tommy Heinrich and the chocolate milk and cookies. So, for reassurance I guess, probably misplaced, I slip one hand into my purse and feel the snub nose .25 caliber automatic my father had given me as a college graduation present. It was hardly bigger than two cigarette lighters. I could almost palm it. ‘A woman’s gun,’ my father called it. ‘But useful.’ That was not  his only graduation present, mind you. There was also a silver necklace I still wear sometimes. Anyway, I stop pacing, try to look casual and slowly smoke the next cigarette.”

“What happened then?”

“What do you think? The mechanic changed my tire, I paid him five dollars and finished driving home.”

“Do you still have that .25?”

“No. Replaced it years ago with a 9mm automatic. What about you? I seem to remember you were a big gun control guy when we were on the Hill.”

“I was, for decades. But times change. I bought a Glock last year.”

“Good,” Sandy said. “Next time, instead of lunch, we’ll go to a range and practice.”

 

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Eric Rozenman is a frequent contributor to New English Review and author of the newly-released The David Discovery, A Novel of the Near Future.

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