A Painful Lesson

6^th grade, 1979

I moved out of the path of an 8th-grade cheerleader. She was one of the richest girls in school, pretty and built (for being an 8^th grader) and knew it, and I admired her for her beauty and disliked her for it at the same time. She walked arrogantly down the hallway, right down the middle like a Coast Guard cutter slicing through the sea. The hallway was crowded, and I had to move back to the right side. The middle school hallways always seemed to follow the same sort of rules as the roads in town did. Traffic stayed to the right, unless you were important, or at least felt that you were. 

The boy’s restroom sign came into view, and honestly, none too soon, as I had needed to use the restroom all the way through math. I had several minutes before my next class, which was right down the hall. I veered into the restroom and headed toward a urinal.

Without warning, there was a hard blow on my back, propelling me into a wall, one of those cinder block wall types. I rebounded like a basketball and was grabbed and spun around. He pushed me against the wall and gripped me by the front of the neck. I was a small kid, one of the youngest in my 6th-grade class, short and thin. The boy facing me was much larger, an 8th-grade football player, and naturally, because these sorts of things never involve one boy, he had three of his friends with him, to cheer him on. He was much larger than me and crazy strong, and I remember thinking how big his arms were.  He was wearing a black and white school shirt. Northwood Panthers. I didn’t recall his name, though I recognized him, and oddly, my brain locked onto trying to recall his name. Instinctively, I pulled my books tighter against my chest, close to my body. I remember that he smelled like sweat.

He said something that I didn’t hear because I was still working on figuring out his name. Then he grabbed my books out of my arms and threw them into the trash can. Spinning around, he grabbed me by the front of my shirt, and demanded to know what “a fag like me was doing in the boy’s bathroom”. I protested that I wasn’t a fag, and he demanded to know why I carry my books like a girl. You might recall that middle school kids will seize on any little thing to belittle someone else, and thus elevate their own status. Meanwhile, all boys knew that being labeled a “fag” (homosexual) was essentially the kiss of death.

Suddenly, I was confronted with what I hadn’t ever realized. I typically carried my books in my arm, against my chest, just like that aforementioned cheerleader did. Like girls all over school did. There was an unwritten rule, you see, that boys carried their books down at their side, and girls carried their books against their chest, tilting them out as if they had breasts, trying to look like the high school girls did. So now I’m being confronted by this football player, who is literally yelling at me, and all my brain can do now is wonder why in the world I was carrying my books like that, and why it mattered at all. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized, believe it or not, that I carried my books like that. I just carried them how it felt comfortable to me. But that was the wrong way to do it. Right? So, I’m now focusing on the way, and have forgotten the search for his name.

I was standing there, feeling extremely vulnerable, for some reason folding my arms across my chest. I had never felt like that in my life. He demanded to know what I was doing in the “men’s room”. Now they were men, notice. Boys a moment ago, men now.

Though I’m sure it made him feel manly, the punch to the stomach that followed wasn’t exactly a blessing, in my viewpoint. Then, punched again, I was on the floor, being punched and kicked. One. Then another kick, then a third, really hard kick, that one from another boy. One kick to the stomach, one to the side, one to the small of the back. Lots of punches. Chest, stomach, side, back, thigh. None of the blows fell on my face or arms, but only in places that wouldn’t leave marks. If I tried to cover an area, they simply shifted to a different area. I couldn’t catch my breath. Then the obligatory laughter, and one of them spit on me. I remember the feel of it, wet and disgusting, on the side of my neck. They discussed for a moment whether they should pee on me. Then, of course, the obligatory threat to never return to the men’s room, and they left.

I was in a lot of pain. I was crying at this point. Shocked. Horrified. Very, very afraid. The floor was cold. My throat hurt from where he had gripped it. My head hurt from striking the floor. My stomach, site of multiple punches, and a kick, hurt. I finally got my books out of the trash can, an act that disgusted me, because I really have never liked unsanitary areas. That’s an understatement. I went into a stall, and sat down on a toilet seat lid, but that didn’t help at all. There were no stall doors, and I was crying and shaking in the boy’s room. I had to get out of there.

 I worked desperately to stop crying, then grabbed some paper towels, and washed my face and neck. I looked in the mirror, had a realization that my eyes were red and my cheeks blotchy, and then was ashamed that I cared how my face looked.  I finally went to class, extremely late, of course. The teacher, sending me to the principal’s office for being late, assumed that my lateness was why I was upset. There, I got the “I’m disappointed in you, I thought you were a good kid” lecture, and was sent back to class. I have no idea, to this day, why I never told. The first person I ever told was my wife, 38 years later.

When I left school that day, the same boys were outside, just finishing destroying my bicycle. I unbent things as best I could, and rode home. There, my extremely conservative parents questioned me about my bicycle, announcing when I tried to explain (leaving out the bathroom incident, mind you) that there was no reason for other boys to damage my bicycle. That, naturally, comforted me not at all. Since there was no way I could tell them what happened, I was punished for lying, because I had said I didn’t do the damage, but wouldn’t give an alternate explanation. Then, I was punished for not taking care of my bicycle.

Oddly, some of the girls were nicer to me after all this happened. I didn’t know why, but I was glad someone was nice to me. I saw the boys many times, of course, after that day. They always made a point of laughing or flipping me off. Otherwise, they left me alone, probably deciding they had made their point. But I was careful, after that. I was careful when entering restrooms.  I watched outside for a minute or so, and looked carefully inside before fully entering. If someone was there, I left. If the restroom was unoccupied, I finished quickly, leaving as fast as humanly possible. I was careful how I carried my books too, making sure they were in my hand, down at my side, because that’s how the boys carried their books. I was a boy. So, do it right. Or else.