From Child to Pork Chop Madman | Teen Ink

From Child to Pork Chop Madman

April 6, 2018
By AtomicOblivion SILVER, Madison, Georgia
AtomicOblivion SILVER, Madison, Georgia
5 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Terry Bernard Ball Jr., age 29, hit his mom with a porkchop, and proceeded to headbutt her. He did this because his mom did not buy him cigarettes. He had a 12 month probation due to this assault.. About 3 weeks later, he violated the probation order by going to his mother's house and challenging people to a fight at a family gathering. His reasoning for this madness, he could no longer eat pork chops but instead had to eat spaghetti.
Terry Bernard Ball Jr. had been a troubled child. His mother and father did not discipline well.  When Terry walked it was like you could hear an elephant coming through the door and excess skin plagued his well being as a child. He used to be big, fat and blubbery because his family ate lots of pasta, and when he tried to exercise he ended up being worn out and gave up within the week.
His mother always said to him, “Son, you may be meaty, but you haven’t burned your baby fat yet.” Terry was pushed around on the playground  as a kid. Kids beat him badly, especially for kindergartners. They would push him while playing on the merry go round, and the teachers thought that they were just playing.
Terry responded to the bullies by saying, “I have room for being better even though I am five.”  Terry never forgot those bullies from kindergarten who tortured his mental and physical health.
When Terry walked into sixth grade all of his fat seemed to have run away. He explored a pork and greens diet that started in fifth grade. In fact, he used to be one of the most fit kids in the school by sixth grade. In the fall he ran cross country. Then in the winter he played basketball, and lastly in spring he played baseball. That year of school had been great, but he reached the pinnacle of his school career the next year.
In the seventh grade he made the football team as quarterback, and the team mates like to call him lil’ ball, because he was small but tough.. He became the lead scorer on the basketball team that season, and star of the baseball team.  While managing to be a great athlete he also made high marks in school. Terry spent all of his time practicing and studying. Little did he know that it was  all downhill from here.
Often, when things go so well people can get overconfident, and think that they are everything. Terry, sadly, was a victim of this. He started on the football team that year, again, but  8th grade was suddenly difficult. He started to get lower grades. His dedication to sports caused him to miss homework assignments, and he lost his ability to study. Lower grades were caused by Terry’s ignorance to face the situation. Then Terry got the mother of all bad grades, in his pre algebra class, he got an F-. a F-. This got him kicked off the football team. He couldn’t play basketball, and he started stress eating. By the time he got his second semester grade up, baseball tryouts were over with. He gave up on school sports after that.
That night he knew his sports career had ended. He told his mother, “I give up on my grades, I will just try to pass only because of you.”
Now Mrs. Ball looked into her sad son’s eyes and screamed like a preacher giving a church sermon, “Never give up son! I believe in your ability to make good grades and I expect you to! Never give up! I made good grades and did well, so I expect you, you to do better.” Terry thought for a long time. Then he remembered his obesity and how he overcame it. He thought that if he could conquer that, he could conquer anything.
He passed  8th grade and went onto high school. 9th grade got tough for Terry and he ended up making mediocre grades. His mom almost blew her red face up and she wanted to let out the steam by screaming at the top of her lungs, but she did not want to stress him out even more. When he got into 10th grade he made even lower marks such as a D in algebra, and he failed biology. Finally, when he turned 16 he got a driver's license, and dropped out of school.
His mother wasn’t very keen with this because you could see the red in her face as the blood got hotter, and the light steam coming out of her ears. The school always sent a note to the parent at the end of the year with a grade summary, and Terry’s didn’t come.
She asked what he did all year, and he said, “I got a full time job, and got home before you.” She wasn’t pleased by this comment and his disrespect towards her, so she grounded him from leaving the house and seeing his friends for a few months. 
When he turned eighteen he decided to work somewhere else, so he started to work at a local barber shop. While most people said kind things to Terry,  some people called him a stupid dropout. Even though jerks came to the barber shop, he had made a soft skinned, long haired, blue eyed lady friend. He started seeing her on a regular basis. He saved money to take her on special date nights; you could say he got a girlfriend.
But one day it all changed when his mom came to get a haircut, and she was surprised to see her son working there. When he got home that night she said she wanted him to go back to school. He refused at first but eventually gave in.
He restarted in the 11th grade. He had a rusty start, for he couldn’t remember anything he was from age 5- age 15. When his girlfriend found out he went back to high school, she broke up with him. Afterwards he found  new friend named depression, but he ended that year with a B average. 12th grade wasn’t the kindest to him since he ended with a C average, but he still got his diploma, at age 22.
Then he went back to work force, now in construction. He worked on structures from bunkers to skyscrapers. His mom had just retired, and he still lived with her so he could pay the bills for her new house.
Now that his mom had a lot of free time she mastered the making of pork chops. Terry cherished her pork chops. He basically only felt like eating those, because of the warm good feeling he got after having a taste of that heavenly ham. One day she made spaghetti, because she heard that if you exercise regularly it would help you be energized. Terry had a job in construction where you have to be fit, so he reluctantly ate it. Once he ate it, it was like satan had made the food , and cursed every noodle that went into your mouth. It made him have the same feelings from losing  his girlfriend, to being bullied. He preferred pork chops because it reminded him of how he overcame that.
While working construction he had numerous “girlfriends”, everyone of which left him in a day or two. Then he started to smoke to get stuff off of his mind. One day Terry stopped going to work. He didn’t go for a while because he had depression issues that had him think of suicide several times. If he had thought of suicide at the construction site he would have done it there. He was only supposed to miss work for a few weeks, but those weeks became months. He went back to work one day and resigned before they could fire him. His life got worse when he went to apply for a new job, and they denied him because word spread that he was unreliable.
He didn’t have a job, so he joined a gang that led him into a heap of trouble with the law. While in the gang he was caught drug trafficking, and was caught using them. He also got caught beating people.  This brought him to the brink. His mom, disappointed in him, still took care of him because he had nowhere else to go. One evening his mom, on her way to buy dinner, forgot to buy his after dinner cigarettes. Cigarettes at a time Terry’s only way of connecting  to society.
Suddenly, he grabs his greasy, pink pork chop. The pork chop hit her fast, and grease splattered all over her face and her shirt. The pork chop hit her with such force that it put her head in a sideways motion. Then Terry slowly gets up and charges in his mother's direction. His head was as  hard as a rock, and went right into his mom’s stomach. His dad then tackles Terry while his mom struggled to grab the   phone and call the cops.
Terry had a trial, charged for battery, and found guilty. His sentence had him probated from his mother's house for 12 months. While he rented a tiny room for three months all he could only afford spaghetti and meat sauce. It tasted like nothing, and the texture made him long for his mom's savory pork chops.  Each time he ate the spaghetti painful memories started to plague him. Then he made a decision. He had a red rage in his eyes, there was steam coming out of his ears, (Or the oven) he was going to make the one person who made him feel this way suffer.
“They will pay for this,” Terry said to  himself.
He slowly walked to the house. He could see cars different colors of cars. It was apparent family was here because the dents in the cars felt familiar. It was almost like the family was having the reunion without him. His family had the family reunion at his mother's house that year. He slowly opened the door, and put his raggedy black coat on the hanger next to several other coats. He wanted to challenged Great Uncle Ferdinand to a fight, then Aunt Lucy, even Papa Jimbo, because they ate pork chops without him, and he didn’t eat his three months earlier. When Mr. and Mrs. Ball saw their son they sprinted to the phone and slowly dialed 911. You could see the regret in their eyes as they quickly told the operator what Terry was doing. Terry was tasered and the cops could see the kids knee scrape on the ground as they watched him awake in full out pain.
Negativity got to  him and that's why he ultimately went insane.


The author's comments:

I was told to0 write, and this happned.


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