The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked
By David Benjamin
Random House, $23.95
ISBN 0375507280

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When last is best

Maybe writing well is the best revenge. Put-upon kids who grow up to be authors can finally achieve the admiration that eluded them on the playground and, in the process, reduce their long-ago tormentors to caricatures and footnotes. The chip-on-the-shoulder title of David Benjamin's new book, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, gives fair warning that some old scores are going to be settled.

Benjamin's memoir -- which, he teases, is "mostly" true -- places him in that crowded pantheon of sensitive, precocious lads who seem to have been taking notes even as they were taking abuse from their peers. The author chronicles his boyhood in Tomah and Madison, Wisconsin, during the late 1950s. His parents were divorced -- an embarrassing circumstance for any kid at that time, but especially so for a Catholic attending Catholic schools. Benjamin's being parentally untethered, however, forced him to absorb life's gritty lessons first-hand. It wasn't his home or church, for example, that imbued him with his boyhood credo, but rather the character of Paladin on the then-popular TV series, Have Gun, Will Travel.

A point Benjamin makes time and again is that parents today immobilize their children with excessive attention. He recalls covering a Little League meeting after he became a newspaper editor and being dismayed at the level of control the adults exerted: "That meeting pretty much explained to me why kids don't go outside anymore, among themselves, and play ball all day long. They've stopped because they're being watched."

While Benjamin's stories have an undertone of sadness, his manner of telling them is generally funny and often hilarious. Being an alert sort, as a young man he bounces through life from one epiphany to another. Experimenting with his father's .22 rifle, he vaporizes a titmouse, shocking himself at the gun's capacity for casual destruction. He and his teammates mangle their school's only soccer ball and discover that by pooling their money and buying a new one they not only escape reprimand but also reap praise for their initiative. What a way to keep adults at arm's length, he marvels.

Benjamin has a real eye for character. He surrounds himself with a gallery of deftly drawn sidekicks, bullies, misfits and girls: "Puberty had lifted Donna so far above the rest of us," he remembers, "that we were but featureless specks, watching her soar, powerless and irretrievable, into the brooding clouds of adulthood."

As alluring as fishing and baseball were to him, it was kid-organized football that transformed Benjamin as he edged into adolescence. "Here was a game," he says, "where you could be a human sonnet, leaping, flying, snatching victory from the sky, or you could be a bulldozer in a ditch, spewing mud, strewing grubs, and crushing vegetation." He was a sonnet, indeed. Able to run faster and more erratically than the others, Benjamin at last knew the euphoria of being the first kid picked.

Edward Morris is a Nashville writer.