Daniel Rubin | Bullying leaves some deep scars

I don't know what demons chased Seung-Hui Cho.

But when I read how the Virginia Tech shooter had been bullied in middle school - pushed down, laughed at, mocked for his mangling of English - I couldn't help going back to my own story of torment.

How I spent most of ninth grade shuttered in my room.

I was an easy target, walking by the woods behind my house, toting a stack of LPs to the house of a friend, the drummer in our band.

It was the beginning of the school year. I was small, soft, and swaddled in mother-love.

Coming toward me was a sullen, slack-jawed guy named Elvis, who wore a baggy old Army jacket. A football player in uniform walked with him. I said hello to Elvis and his friend smashed me on the cheek, the foam padding on his knuckles barely softening the blow. I went flying. The records went flying.

"What did you do that for?" I asked. He and Elvis laughed and continued on their way.

I got up a different kid.

I don't remember if I went to my friend's. I know I didn't tell anyone.

But I'd seen that guy before, and soon I was running highlight reels in my head - of a Pop Warner football game a few years before. I'd been playing linebacker, and a kid flew out of the backfield and leveled me with a block.

On the sidelines, a man with a German shepherd tethered at his side hollered, "Way to go, Frankie!"

The words might not be exact. But I can still picture the menace. The man was "Cadillac" Frank Salemme - big, rough, connected, we all knew. He lived a street behind us.

His son, Frank Jr., had just switched to the public school for ninth grade, and I was his new target.

The next day in the hallway, as I slipped past a group of guys, Frank Jr. broke from the crowd and swung fast.

To this day, a tiny notch in my jaw testifies to that punch.

That was enough. I spent the rest of the year finding ways to avoid going out, not confiding in my parents or friends, not thinking that anybody could help me.

I figured I'd brought it on myself.

Too soft, too much mother-love. Was it because I was a braggart, a clown, a Jew, a coward? No idea, still.

My exit strategy involved a change of schools the next year, moving from our town in Massachusetts to a boarding school in Connecticut, where it took me a good year and a half to shed the sense of being a victim.

Growing helped. So did learning to tear someone apart with my words. I still have never swung at someone, but I have never had to.

Though I have forced myself to go into war zones. And I'm sure that bravura, too, comes from that day.

Turns out that "Cadillac" Frank was well connected indeed. He became boss of the Patriarca family, meaning he ran the Boston Mafia. And Frankie? He died while under federal indictment for racketeering. Leukemia, the papers said.

It makes for a better story that I was bullied by a bold-faced bad guy. But that torment is something that lots of kids endure - in a poll of elementary students in California and Arizona released after the Virginia Tech shootings, nearly 90 percent of the children reported being bullied and 59 percent said they had bullied other students.

And the Salemmes' infamy was of no consolation at the time. It's a wonder I came out whole. I'm not sure I did - I have a temper that must have its roots in that moment in the woods.

But I had parents to talk to, even if they didn't know how to make the problem go away. Once I was brave enough to confide in them, they listened. And let me start over someplace new.

Bullying alone didn't make Seung-Hui Cho become the gunman who murdered the most people in U.S. history. The therapists use words like paranoia, sadism, possible psychosis. There's no easy armchair diagnosis for what troubled him.

But the scars from childhood run deep. And they're permanent. It takes lots of talk and time to help them fade.