In 'Whipping Boy,' a search for a tormentor
Allen Kurzweil's childhood tormentor was no ordinary bully.
He was a 1970s Swiss boarding school bully, a 12-year-old boy of mysterious origins whose tools of torture included a bottle of hot sauce, a foosball table, a belt and the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack.
He was, to hear Kurzweil tell it, anti-Semitic and masochistic, seemingly emboldened by a lack of parental accountability and a look-the-other-way school administration.
And he had a quintessential bully name: Cesar Augustus.
Yes, that's his real name. In Kurzweil's first work of non-fiction, no names have been changed to protect the guilty.
But what exactly is Cesar Augustus guilty of? That's the tantalizing and somewhat unresolved mystery driving Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully.
Whipping Boy quickly turns from a series of vivid childhood anecdotes to a well-told tale of international intrigue, as Kurzweil documents his quest to discover whatever happened to the overweight 12-year-old bully with the unruly hair who simply disappeared from school one day.
Aided by his son Max — then the same age as Kurzweil was when he was bullied — the author uses patience, determination and guile to get access to reams of secret files a less dogged reporter on deadline would never see. After a number of seeming dead ends, he stumbles upon his bully among a particularly audacious group of mysterious scoundrels known as the Badische Trust Consortium.
At its best, Whipping Boy is journalism wrapped in memoir, making it a welcome departure in a genre where facts are often subjective and hazy childhood memories are overwrought. But there's another reason why the meat of the book is a just-the-facts detective story. The plot is so unlikely — and the cast of characters so preposterous — that the story doesn't need any embellishment.
Like any memoirist honest with himself, Kurzweil doesn't pick at the scabs of his boarding school abuse for nothing. There's a story here, and Kurzweil is a writer, after all. (His literary credits include two period novels: A Case of Curiosities and The Grand Complication, and children's books like Leon and the Spitting Image — whose antagonist, it turns out, was based on Cesar Augustus.)
"All writers are stalkers," Kurzweil writes as he stalks Cesar through the Swiss Alps to the slums of Manila, and from there to the board room of an elite New York law firm and a federal prison.
The tale spans years and continents, but "a 40-year search" might be overselling it a bit. His preoccupation with his bully appears real, but short of Melvillian, and is self-consciously driven by the need to write.
"Obsessives tend to have obsessions." Kurzweil says simply.
Whipping Boy is more than a work of misery lit. Cesar Augustus is by no means innocent, but he turns out to be a more intriguing character than the one-dimensional goon he's portrayed as in the opening chapters. And Kurzweil? It's unclear whether even his 40-year search has led him to any profound personal discoveries.
Cesar's most unforgivable act of torment was to mastermind the theft of a watch owned by Kurzweil's father. He uses time as a metaphor throughout the book, but Cesar is even more philosophical.
"There is no such thing as time," Cesar says in the book's surprise ending. "Man created time."
Indeed, change provides only the illusion of time.
But if people don't change, even the illusion disappears. Is that what Cesar meant? It may be that the 12-year-old bully stumbled upon a more profound truth than the author ever could.
Then again, he was never just an ordinary bully.
Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully
By Allen Kurzweil
Harper
3 stars out of four
Gregory Korte is a White House reporter for Paste BN whose childhood bullies shall remain anonymous. Follow @gregorykorte on Twitter.