ON GREENVALLEY ROAD
“Hey, you wanna see what Suzie has in her backpack today?”
The backpack is sent flying and soon disgorges, and bruises, the cherished Académie sketch pad. Pencils bounce and scatter. Jane (as in Austen, yes) skitters across the asphalt.
“Suzie’s reading a girl’s book,” observes Alfred, the ringleader. “What a faggot.”
“Suzie is a girl,” says Jared, his sidekick. “Are you a girl, Suzie?”
“Can you guys just leave me alone,” I say firmly. My version of firmly. But my voice—I can’t help it—goes up at the end of the sentence.
“Can us guys just leave you alone?” Alfred echoes. “Sure we can, sweetie. But there’s something we need to check out first.”
Lunch hour at Wonderland Avenue Elementary School, fall semester, fourth grade. Jared wraps his ample arms around me and drags me behind the ball shed—a dreaded, even more unsupervised corner of the school yard. Before I know it I’m flat on the ground, looking up at the giant eucalyptus trees that tower over parts of the canyon and perfume it with their spicy, pungent scent. I will loathe that scent for years—forever.
Jared is a large, heavyset specimen with oily skin. His bottom smashes onto my face; he plants his feet on my hands. Alfred sits on my legs.
“If Suzie is a girl, why is she wearing boys’ clothes?” Alfred muses. “Hey, Suze, why are you wearing those boys’ clothes?”
Before I can answer, think how to answer, he adds, “Why don’t we see what she’s got down there?”
I try to kick them off me, but they settle in like two boulders.
“I’m not touching her down there. No way.”
“You could do it with your foot,” says Alfred. “Your shoe.”
“You can’t be sure what you’re feeling with your shoe,” says Jared.
“We could use a stick,” says Alfred.
“Same problem,” says Jared.
They ponder for a moment while I try to breathe.
“I’ll just do it. I’ll hold my breath or something,” says Alfred. “Here. Take her feet.”
The two of them change places. If I’d had a chance to eat any lunch, it would have come up out of me. Instead a foul taste fills my mouth, and it goes dry.
Alfred reaches for my belt buckle and yanks it open. His eyes glitter (why do they glitter?) as his hand shoots in … and down. And grips. Hard. The pain is sudden and deep, as if there were a live wire running between my groin and my stomach.
Only later does it occur to me to think, If I am the faggot, why is Alfred going beyond grip to exploration?
“She’s got one all right,” Alfred informs Jared. “A small one.”
He makes a show of wiping his hand off on his jeans.
“Maybe she’s a hermaphrodite,” Jared says.
“What’s that?”
“A boy with titties. Or a girl with a dick. I saw it in a book. There’s a sculpture, some ancient Roman thing, of a he-she.” He turns to Alfred. “Should I look?”
Alfred nods. Jared reaches for my shirt.
“No titties.” He kicks me in the chest. “But maybe this’ll make a nice little bump.”
“A dick and barely any titties. What is she, then?” wonders Alfred.
“Hell if I know,” says Jared.
Suzie. Sissy. Faggot. Latent homosexual (that one I had to look up). Was I what they said, what they called me? What was I? All I knew was that I wasn’t a boy the way they were boys. I certainly wasn’t a girl. And I didn’t feel an attraction to anyone at that age. I had only one matter on my mind, one goal: to make it through the school day without these thugs or their minions (and they had them, many of them) going after me.
I honed my approach over the years. After the incident behind the ball shed, I kept myself covered up. I buckled my belt so tightly that the clasp (brass, two-pronged) bit into my flesh, leaving indentations that were visible in a certain light for days afterward. I wore layers of T-shirts, short sleeve over long sleeve, though sometimes the other way around, to help insulate my body, even on seventy-, eighty-degree days. Of course I kept my distance, sitting off in a corner of the school yard bent over my reading or my sketching, as inward-turning and balled-up as it was possible for a tall, gangly, vigilant boy to be.
My technique didn’t always work. Well into middle school there was scarcely a season, outside of summer, when my body was without bruises in different evolving shades: blue-black, purple-blue, greenish-yellow, yellowish-beige.
My self—my inner self—was a different matter. From Alfred, my experience of Alfred, I trained myself to go dead. I went through a kind of ritual every morning as soon as I stepped out our front door. It lasted for the amount of time it took me to walk from our house to the bus stop. I began with my feet and worked my way up my entire body, stiffening and hardening it from within. Going dead inside in this way, deep inside, made me strong, impermeable. A warrior. That was how I thought of it: I was a warrior who every day went to do battle at Wonderland Avenue Elementary and later Bancroft Junior High. To be a target while other people did battle, though, was more accurate.
You don’t want to be ordinary, do you, Lovey? To fit in? Fitting in is a form of living death. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always.
I always did.
Alfred was a dead ringer for Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad magazine mascot that was Danny’s preferred reading material in these years. He even had his freckles, a version of his unorthodontured teeth, and a similar if slightly less exaggerated dead, mal-shaped left eye.
His modus operandi was to lie in wait, coiled and cobra-like, in all the interstitial spaces in the day where bullies tend to thrive. At the bus stop in the morning and again in the afternoon. On the playground at recess. Or at lunch hour, where he was often assisted in his machinations by his greasy, rotund sidekick, Jared.
But Alfred’s deepest, strangest power was his Janus-like changeability. At school he was a combination of demon and ringmaster. On the bus ride he liked to finish off the day’s work by digging his nails into the backs of my hands, gouging out tiny crescent-shaped bits of flesh into which a few drops of blood would rise up afterward. Yet as soon as the bus pulled away and the other neighborhood kids scattered, often, as often as not, he would turn to me and say, “So do you want to come over and play?” Or trade baseball cards (an early shared interest)? Or stamps (a later one)?
Absurdly to me now, I would answer, “Sure.” I would go home and change out of my school clothes, pick up my handball or my trading cards or my stamp collection, and I would cross the street to his house, or else he would cross the street
