When we were children there was this game that was played. 4th grade. I was in a new school, new town, with new “friends”. Football, drugs, and church summed up this new place. At least one Minister was known for indiscretions. Maybe with kids. I don’t know what those parents payed attention too, just the stories children told. Still, it seemed the churchgoers weren’t listening.
This school system’s rival was two towns over. These cities might have been like your own hometown. If you’re older than 35 and female, was always one of the boys even though you enjoyed dresses, and if you were from a rural area too you may already be familiar with some of this story…
The game was boys against girls. It was kind of like tag (or training for future drunken assault). Boys chased girls around the schoolyard and captured them, dragging them into boy-jail against the fence. A few of them kept guard so you couldn’t get away. It was supposed to be sexy (I think?). Forth grade hormones were kicking in, and we were all starting to be scrambled up by the simplest, awkwardest things. For example, Kirk Cameron was a poster you could get through The Reading Club and everyone had him.
I wasn’t turned on during this recess game though, I was terrified. I didn’t want to be owned by a boy, put in his jail, and told I couldn’t leave to spend my recess how I wanted.
Maybe it was the ethics of 1987 imprinting on my young mind, but that year I also had dreams of getting breast implants. Dolly Parton was pictured in lace in a magazine being passed around the classroom to smirks and stares as we learned about the vas deferens and fallopian tubes. It’s too bad they never told us they’re the same things, just in different bodies…
During that game I’d sit on the tar, knees to my chest, arms clenched by my sides when a boy caught my eye and start running towards me. On the basketball court, which rarely saw basketball played, I’d tighten all of my muscles as hard as I could, clenching my jaw and squeezing closed my eyes. I made myself heavy and dense. I willed my body to be immoveable. Unpickupable. Sheer intention through physical lockdown was my ritual. After plenty of tries, by the end of our time, I proved too big a hassle, and would be left alone. Uncaptured.
I was a boulder in a dress.
No fun.
Next recess I’d find other friends, always girls at that age. I still wasn’t safe from the games I didn’t like that they played, but at least I liked them enough to engage.
This is to say that I was a child. I taught myself these things, ’cause it seemed the teachers weren’t listening.
I was stranded further out each time I stood with my gut against the grain. I was mocked and bullied or beat because this kid had a crush on me, or that kid had a crush on them, and I was too oblivious and awkward, too weird to understand the mating rituals of teenagers and their often violent endings.
A couple grades later added male teachers to the list of people trying to look down my dress or up my skirt. Boys learned to sneak glimpses loitering by the girl’s bathroom entrance. It was Freshman year. I went to the mandatory (because I was in marching band) football pep rally. There I witnessed our rival team’s mascot being burned in a raging bonfire while drunken townsfolk cheered. I went home early with a stomachache, not understanding this type of revelry. That school district was hell, and the sports fans definitely weren’t listening.
###
The mascot burned that night was of high school number two that I went to. Sophomore year. I joined Latin Club, and went to their social to meet people. During potluck lunch they learned I had come from enemy territory. By the end of the social I’d been sold at highest price to bidders. You see, new club members were considered merchandise for a mock Roman slave auction fundraising activity. The following day at school I was charged with doing whatever my new “owner”, a popular Senior, desired. So in 1993 I sang on cafeteria tabletops, crawled on my knees to Math, and other less palatable things. The entire school was complicit, so “it was ok”, and I was excused for my sore knee’d lateness to class.
At this same school I was assaulted by my gym teacher while sitting on the bleachers waiting to play my trombone for pep band at “the game”. He continued to harass me during gym class after a meeting between my parents and the Principle didn’t change anything. No, the authorities were not listening.
###
School number three was a smaller more artsy school, nestled directly between the prior two. There was no football team, instead Soccer ruled their day. They had an intramural hockey team captained by a few kids who became my friends—they were Jazz Band geeks too. They had named their hockey team “the Scrodominators”, and I’d met most of them over the summer in community theater. They started a battle-of-the-bands ensemble, so I joined and played trombone and back-up sang to Weezer’s “Undone”. We won, and were given a performance slot at the bandstand during our town’s yearly Summer Holiday. We wore peach and green tie-dyed t-shirts, newly silk screened, to unabashedly announce our group’s name to the city: “The Fuzzy Apricots”. (We thought we were pretty funny.)
This pack of boys who caused mischief were my crew. Senior year they even came to my ballet classes and learned choreography for a recital or talent show or something… I was kind of an honorary “one of them”, often serving as the bridge to the girl’s group who hung out with us too. On nights when I felt the blood stirring restless in my veins, I’d call the guys to get invited out. We’d skate on a nearby pond, hike around private property exploring abandoned quarries, or play hockey in the road in front of my house until the police (having little else to do), would pull up in the middle of my epically empty street and threaten county jail for our “illegal street activity” which was “impeding the (nonexistent) flow of traffic”. I literally and metaphorically lived on the wrong side of the tracks, but my friends had parents who were lawyers. We were lucky, and most of us were white in this tiny city with only one flashing yellow light.
Summer nights after Senior year were filled with breaking into the ironically named “Yacht Club”. Ironic because it was on a small lake where the townsfolk kept their canoes and a sunfish or two locked away. After midnight we’d go naked swimming—everyone knew the combination on that gate. Ravenous by 2am we’d hit up Dunkin’s, the only 24/7 joint within an hour’s drive, and then maybe grab a cigar from someone’s house to share while playing overtly flirtatious rounds of Mao in a barn attic down the street from my house until dawn.
We were drunk on each other.
On daring to play and make up games.
Fed by hormones and creativity.
In my teenage years my friends and I were busted up by local cops while lovemaking in the forest, on beaches, and in fields. You see, country is country, and under a black sky filled with billions of stars, smoking shitty 1990’s New England weed on the javelin mats out by the high school track, or on a lake in some friend’s no electric no plumbing summer shack, or in the attic bedroom where our whole Senior class almost got mono, that was pretty much what there was to do. With nothing but time and youth on our side, we were searching out the Deities of pleasure. Pleasure was the only thing we knew of to get us out (funny how I long for that mundane and gorgeous land today).
I wanted to move to the city and be an artist.
For college I ended up in Boston.
The rest is history.
###
What I’m saying is that artists have been the only folks even remotely safe for me to explore with, well the artists and the queers. Dominant culture still scares and never ceases to surprise me. How does one survive, so shut down and seemingly full of hatred? How does one not see misogyny, racism, rampant queerphobia, transphobia, and other oppressions—they’re established and practiced cornerstones of our severely limiting and dangerous patriarchy?
It is 2019.
Online I read, typed out over and again: someone begging for understanding of violent rapists or those who overtly undermine the bodies and rights of people who contend with pregnancy; the chalking up of this burned cross or that dead trans woman of color to sticking out “inappropriately”; adamant red-faced tales describing border detainees as “illegal” versions of humanity; not to mention politically manipulative redistricting defined as “permissible” constitutionally.
I live in a neighborhood full of people with skin different colors than my own, yet our bank accounts are probably quite the same. I’ve empathy, though I’ll never know firsthand my neighbor’s specific struggles or feel the exact grief in someone else’s bones for what they’ve lived through and had passed down as trauma generationally. We don’t have the same privileges in this society, and so we live together suspicious sometimes… until we’re not. Sometimes all you can do is sit in your car or drive, stereo loud enough to beat down repression before it catches up.
My experiences aren’t dire compared to many of my neighbors’ when that repression takes the form of cops.
According to politicians and people of means, we’re meant to be caged like animals for daring to survive.
Those with power are actively choosing the behavior of never listening.
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
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