Well this is petty but my two main friends growing up were always a little physically braver than me. Example: Jumping off the peak of the roof into my friends pool. They loved doing that crap. I hated it but I couldn’t back down so I did it.
Also, when my friend got his first car he drove like any other teenage kid: too fast, reckless and almost out of control. I hated that too though I did it sometimes myself.
And once me and my friend got a couple of skateboards and went up a local hill and tried to go down it.
This was like 1973 or 1974. The skateboards were made of wood and mine had metal wheels. I made a few attempts but I kept jumping off before hitting the steep part but my friend did it. Yeah, I chickened out on that one. But I got my revenge. Once when we were 17, all three of us got dressed up semi-nicely, drank a few beers apiece, smoked a few joints and headed downtown on a Saturday night to “pick up woman”. We were deluded, lol, we tried all through high school and there were only two times when we actually met women who would give us the time of day and talked to us. But talking was as far as it ever went. We were young, dumb, and …(some of you might know the rest, lol.)
But this particular time we were walking and we passed a bar and three cowboys who were on the sidewalk started hassling my friend for no reason. He exchanged words with them and one of them pushed him. Discretion is the better part of valor so we just kept walking. They looked to be about 19 or 20. At the end of the street I turned and gave them a dirty look and yadda, yadda, yadda, we went behind a building so my friend could pee and the three cowboys came running up out of nowhere and one of them just hauled of and punched me in the face pretty hard and knocked me down.
I jumped up and hit him several times but he hit me in the face again knocking me to the pavement again. Then my friend jumped on the cowboys back to pull him off me. Anyways, me and my friend were fighting back but my skateboard friend (from the hill) totally got scared and started begging and pleading for the cowboys not to hit him. I know it’s petty but I felt vindicated some how.
Anyways, a year later an acquaintance showed me and my two friends a tree back in the hills that someone had nailed three foot 2 X 4’s all the way up spaced about a foot and a half apart. It was a tall tree, about maybe 60 or 70 feet high. At the top was a flimsy platform that fit about three people if they were sitting. So it looked pretty precarious because if you slipped climbing up it and fell you would land on an empty, rocky dried up creek bed and the fall could have conceivably killed you.
So the friend who helped me fight refused to climb it. I had no problem with it. Me and the other guys climbed the boards to the top and sat on the flimsy platform and smoked a couple of joints and talked and then headed down.
We went to that tree several times weeks later but my friends would not climb it. So petty or not, that kind of made me feel better that he would not climb and I felt vindicated again. These friends used to gang up and pick on me so I don’t feel bad about enjoying their fear.