You know, sometimes I get Dickheadz guilt. Sometimes I wish there was a Pepto-Bismol colored drink to soothe the quease of my moral qualms. Church folk have it easy. All they do is confess their sins and everything’s cool. So when selecting Dickheadz, I try to make sure I’m not overlooking any potentially redeeming qualities. Luckily for me (and you), Tucker rhymes very immediately with “fucker” and this I took as an irrefutable sign of fate, because Tucker the Fucker lived up to his name.

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Tucker was one of four boys in who we’ll call the Fuckson family. They lived a few houses down from us, and they were the first hillbillies I had ever met.

These kids were like wild animals, or grimy-ass, disagreeable cave juniors. They were really tan, really blond, and completely out of control, all panting and running around, collecting discharged BBs, and making each other cry. They were also totally filthy. I want to say even sandy. They always had dirt and grease on their hands and scabs everywhere, and oh my God, they smelled fucking ghastly. I mean, they ponged. Like that clammy kind of smell that lives under your wrist watch. Only worse, since coming from a pack of clambering, mewling turd-birds.

They all wore the same thing: shorts, t-shirts, and—for most of the year—Tevas. With neon details. It goes without saying that their feet were disgusting! If all those stinky-ass “sport sandals” slapping around wasn’t bad enough, when they took a shit they didn’t flush. But wait—I’m not talking about, oh, just one little turd floating around until the next person goes in. That’s gross enough, but wait, wait! These kids would shit on top of each other’s shit. For real.

On Top of Each Other’s Shit.

What. The. Fuck.

Coming upon a bowl full of multiple shits is horrifying no matter the circumstances, but it’s so much worse when you’re a kid. Because you can’t make sense of the situation. Everything your parents ever taught you about shitting says that it is wrong. You just don’t shit on top of other shits. Seeing a bowl full of multiple shits is like casually opening a cupboard and finding a corpse.

I already thought the Fucksons were weird, but after that I was like, damn, these kids are beasts. It made everything they did seem gross—even Sim Farm, this dumb computer farming game that they always played. There was something about their nasty tan hands being accountable for all that small, squirming, digital activity teeming on the screen.

So yeah, those kids were weird. But they were also our neighbors, and when you’re a kid, you tend to hang out with your enemies and go to their houses and stuff. The other Fuckson kids weren’t too bad. The oldest once gave me a candle of Garfield holding a heart. Okay, fine, so I had to keep it in my room for a long time because I felt all weird about throwing it away, like it would come back to haunt me—but still, it was nice. It was really only Tucker who was the Fucker.

Tucker had problems. Maybe it had something to do with how he insisted on keeping his pillow in the freezer until bedtime, which is totally creepy. Or maybe it was because he was allergic to everything and was limited to second-rate snacks, and that made him full of rage.

My brother says that he was just a jerk and couldn’t help it. That’s probably it. He was just a dick. And he looked like one too, with his small, penisy head. His brothers had normal heads, but he had the head of a dick.

His depths of shittiness began at run-of-the-mill rambunctious behavior, like unnecessarily throwing deck furniture into swimming pools or turning on a garden hose inside his own house (way to go, retard). He was never pleasant (to anyone) and always made this obnoxious, sneering nyyuhh sound, which I think he used to express sarcasm, but it only ever came out as the ineffective affectation of a total moron. Nyyyuuhhh.

I’ll admit we were dickheads back. But it was easy to provoke him and he deserved it, and it was fun because the Fucksons weren’t allowed to cuss, so all he’d shoot back with was his nyuh or “dummy” or “poo-head” or “doody” or “doo-doo.”

To compensate for not being allowed to swear, Tucker the Fucker spent a lot of his energy sticking out his tongue and giving everyone the finger. It became so ingrained in his daily routine that he would do it without cue. All we’d do is walk by and he’d shake his little fuck-you finger at us and do his nyuh, which is why everyone thought he was a prick and why we kept on hassling him.

But he was aggressive too—mindless, peacock-shriek-style aggressive. Tucker had fury. When his anger rose above “doo-doo” and flippin’ the bird, he would just stand there grinding his teeth and making weird noises. And if he got any angrier, he would freak and just flip the fuck out. He would squeal and scream and thrash about on the floor grabbing himself and crying, and then try to kill us. I mean, he would seriously try to claw our eyes out.

We used to play 40-40-Home, which is like a commando version of hide-and-go-seek meets tag. It can be a pretty stressful game, combining the slow, crushing loss of sucking at Monopoly with the mind-rending panic of Burger Time. Tucker somehow always ended up as “it,” which, after a while, got to him and made us provoke him even more, which made him start screaming and throwing rocks and coming after us with sticks.

So one time we were playing 40-40-home, but this time it was at night, which made it totally extreme. Eventually Tucker lost his shit. Really, really lost his shit. We were all in front of his house and he was screaming and he started trashing the garage—picking up everything he could find and throwing it: cans, tools, skateboards, everything. He became more and more violent and eventually found some dog leashes, which he started whipping them around like chains. He was trying to whip us, screaming at the top of his lungs. He probably would have seriously fucked one of us up if his dad hadn’t come out and broken it up. God, what a psycho.

Maybe we shouldn’t have pushed him so much. But you know, Tucker kept on being a Fucker, so we were like, well, OK guy, you had it coming.

Like the time when he decided to saw my brother’s skateboard in half. We only found out about it because we saw Tucker transporting a large potted plant on the sawed-in-half rear section of it, which he was pulling behind him on a string. Sawing skateboards in half is a pretty dick move. And what on earth is a 10-year-old kid doing with a large potted plant?

Anyway, in retaliation we stole Tucker’s skateboard while the Fucksons were away on vacation. We were planning to sell it, but instead my brother hid it in the jungle. The Fucksons came home, noticed that the skateboard was gone, and Tucker put up all these dyslexic signs saying “MISING CHOCLIT SKATEBORD” with a shitty drawing of a skateboard underneath. Sooner or later somebody broke down from guilt, Tucker found out, and we were all busted. My brother retrieved the skateboard which, having been in the jungle for weeks, was all rotting and rusty and totally trashed. We had to buy Tucker a new skateboard, and we were all grounded.

But again, Tucker was still a fucker—our hatred was not quick to wane.

So the Fucksons would be out to dinner or doing some hillbilly shit, and we would go find, like, humongous landscaping rocks and throw them into the Fuckson’s driveway. Of course the Fucksons would come home and be like, Why are there a million broken pieces of rock in our driveway? And then we’d get busted. This would get Tucker crowing and strutting around and flipping the bird at us, which would start the whole cycle again.

What evolved was a mini-neighborhood war—a total saga full of stupid shit and urgent plotting. There were plenty of fistfights too. The kind that’s all shrieking and shoving; the whole embarrassing, unprofessional flailing of 10-year-olds trying to kill each other. Man, being a kid is intense. All you want to do is sabotage peoples’ lives and carefully built forts.

But like I said, Tucker was asking for it. Dickhead.

MMP

If you missed the other Dickheadz, here’s Erik Jackson and here’s Jaspar Logan.