But back to second grade, the time of my first experience with the downside of celebrity. What I felt primarily at that time was not anger but fear. Not so much of physical danger, though there was an undercurrent of that. Mostly I feared the embarrassment of being singled out and picked on. And I was confused and disoriented by the fact that an aspect of my life that I loved, being a part of productions like The Andy Griffith Show and The Music Man, was the reason that I was singled out.
My first week back at school, I didn’t feel safe going to the bathroom. The one time I did, I was harassed and hassled by the bigger boys while I stood at the urinal. But I didn’t want to complain to my teachers or the principal—that would make me a snitch. So I just decided one day that I simply wouldn’t use the bathroom at school. I held it in all morning. I held it in during lunch break. I held it in that afternoon, staring at the clock, waiting for the 2:45 dismissal bell, trying desperately to hold off the stream . . . until, with just a minute or two to go, I could hold it in no longer. I peed in my pants, soaking a whole pantleg. A few kids saw it happen and laughed at me. I ran home, humiliated.
I told my parents how miserable I was feeling. They heard me out and came back with a plan. First, Mom and Dad said, they hoped and predicted that things would settle down if I just hung in there and allowed the novelty of being “the kid from TV” to wear off. But if I was still unhappy at the end of the school year, they would enroll me in a smaller private school tailored to child performers.
Sure enough, by the time the school year ended and my folks checked in with me about whether or not I wanted to leave Stevenson, I made it emphatically clear that I wanted to stay. Their parental wisdom had borne itself out.
But it was a rough path to assimilating into the general student population. For a few weeks, I was a marked man at Stevenson. The encounters usually began with a snide, “Hey, Opie!” Then there would be an escalation to shoving, with other kids gathering around to watch, point fingers, and laugh at me. Then my tormentor, whoever he was that day, would say, “Do you want to fight?”
I didn’t think it was acceptable to back down, so I said, “Yeah!” And here’s where the wrestling and sparring lessons at home with Dad came in handy. After school, my challenger and I would meet on the corner where I lived, Cordova and Oak. We’d start in the standing position, shoving and pushing. Then one of us would latch onto the other, we’d fall to the ground, and it basically became a wrestling match.
This scenario unfolded with distressing regularity in second grade—more distressingly to my mom, who looked on in horror through the front window. My training allowed me to hold my own, usually getting the other kid in a headlock or scissor lock before we called a truce. My challenger would pick himself up, dust himself off, and say something along the lines of “You’re a dead man, Opie,” and skulk home.
Dad never intervened in my front-lawn scuffles, though he saw them from the same vantage point as Mom. He’d done a lot of fighting as a farm boy, and his attitude, as he said to Mom, was “Let them fight it out.” He saw this as a boyhood rite of passage. If blood had been drawn it would have been different, but to Dad, these scraps were just ritualistic displays of elementary-school preening.
I even had the occasion to fight in defense of someone else. I was the third-smallest kid in my grade. The smallest was a boy named Shep. One day, Shep was getting picked on by one of the tallest boys, who I’ll call Jimbo. I said, “Jimbo, leave Shep alone!” You know how it goes from here: “Yeah, whatcha gonna do about it, Opie?” We squared up.
The Ronny-versus-Jimbo match was one for the ages. Well, not really, but it was a triumph for me, because I used my wiles to take him down with a scissor-lock pin. For good measure, I started rubbing his crew-cutted head in the grass, back and forth, back and forth, giving his noggin a Dutch rub with my knuckles, just like Dad had taught me. Jimbo cried uncle. More importantly, he starting acting more kindly toward Shep. And, later on, he and I became friends.
STILL, I CAN’T say that I had a satisfactory relationship with violence. It proved a dead end. A few years later, around fifth or sixth grade, there was a new boy—I’ll call him Skip—who had the look and affect of a 1950s hoodlum: short blond hair done up in a proto-Fonzie ducktail, eyes that were always squinted into slits, like he was looking at you with contempt.