Of ICE and Men: Curley Editon

On performative toughness, fear, and the choice of easy targets

Curley lashed his body around. “By Christ, he’s gotta talk when he’s spoken to. What the hell are you gettin’ into it for?”

“We travel together,” said George coldly.

— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

I’ve never told this story.

It still makes me blush, even now, though it happened about four decades ago, when I was in seventh grade.

“Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.” — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Every so often—working in the garage, mowing the yard, taking out the trash—the memory jumps out from behind some bush in the back of my mind, and I shake my head.

It wasn’t a particularly egregious moment, as far as middle-school foolishness goes. But the fact that it still has life tells me its roots run deep. It draws from an emotional core tied to my sense of self.

All memory has an emotional core. Without affect—without pleasure or pain—nothing sticks. And the things that stick longest tend to be the ones that implicate us.

I don’t beat myself up over it. That would be worse than unhelpful. It’s better, I think, to examine our more foolish moments with a bit of humor. Nothing disarms folly so much as the ability to laugh at our own.

And when we disarm our own follies and examine them honestly—they reveal a great deal about human nature.

At the time, I was just one of the little kids in our school—just one of the junior high students in a building whose halls stretched all the way to twelfth grade. Every day carried the possibility of some older boy dunking us headfirst into a trash can, or yanking our gym shorts down in front of the girls during P.E.

They seemed to have learned something already: that respect could be extracted through fear.

And who doesn’t fear humiliation?

That first fall of middle school, as Halloween crept closer, the boys were talking big. They were going to do—bravely—what they’d learned the older boys did: go out egging.

Roving egg-gangs. Egg wars. Proof of toughness.

Mischief. Glory.

I wanted to go out too—to be big, to be bad, and to belong. So I talked my tall, lanky buddy into coming with me. We told our parents we were going trick-or-treating, which was true, in part. We were still young enough that they believed our half-truth.

We were always together. Same social rank. Same invisibility. Neither of us was particularly athletic or intimidating. Just average dorks, really.

As Halloween evening fell, and the early cold crept into the streets of that little mountain town, we pulled on torn clothes, painted our faces like zombies, grabbed pillowcases for candy—and tucked a dozen eggs into each.

But we didn’t go toward the high school, where we knew the real egg battles would be. We drifted to the other side of town instead. Quieter. Safer. No teenagers with strong arms.

My buddy was confused. “Why are we over here?”

I told him to shut up and follow me down a dirt alleyway, unlit and pitch black.

I had a plan.

We crouched behind a fence and waited. Soon, silhouettes appeared—skeletons, vampires, werewolves, unicorns. A princess. Some were tall.

Mothers.

They couldn’t see us. Not the kids. Not the parents. We waited until they were almost on top of us—six feet away—and then I threw. Once. Twice. Three times.

There were screams. Mothers shouting. Children crying—Mommyyyy.

They ran until they were far enough away to curse us into the dark.

We were already running. I was laughing. My friend wasn’t.

“Dude,” he said, breathless, “what the hell? Those were moms and their kids.”

We went on into the night, pillowcases filled with fewer eggs and some candy. But I didn’t feel big, bad, or brave anymore.

So why tell this story now? 

I tell it because it holds a clue—a small one, but a real one—about how performative toughness works, and how often it depends not on courage, but on choosing those who cannot strike back.

Independent data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which aggregates federal enforcement data, shows that as of late November 2025, 73.6 % of the people held in ICE detention had no criminal conviction when taken into custody.

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