I attended some rather rough and tumble schools in NYC and never had any trouble... And then I went to Ephrata.
I had been living in New York City with my Mom who was basically a crackhead minus the crack. It was my Grandmother’s idea to get me out of the Big Bad City and into country. I was loaded onto a train at Amtrak in Grand Central station in “the City” hugging my weeping mother goodbye. I lived with my Fundamentalist Christian Aunt and their litter of adorable, kind, precocious & Jesus-loving offspring for the next six months on Main Street, in Akron.I attended Ephrata HS.
I was picked on incessantly by a bunch of inbred farm boys. I doubt that they were literally "inbred farm boys," but at the time, I resented being picked on, and the easy explanation was that they were too stupid to appreciate my Urban sophistication: I had a mullet, road an English three speed bicycle, wore tight ass wranglers from Goodwill and had a totally bad ass black and white checkered pencil case/bag. With collared shirts, I was know to on occassion wear a bola tie. God I was hot. So hot, in fact, that I was usually sweating.
My Urban chic' style was met with "gleeking" (a covert way of spitting on someone), constant mocking, being punched in the stomach, and someone trying to throw me in a trash can.
What’s interesting though is that when I remember the experience, I remember it in the emotional state of a profoundly awkward and confused teen, not as the profoundly awkward and confused adult I am now. It's as if the memory of the experience changes who I am for a brief moment.
A most exemplary memory I have is of sitting in the back of English class. We were watching “On the Waterfront” with Marlin Brando. A stocky piggish looking boy was describing to a girl sitting next to him the “gay-ass bike” that he had seen me riding to school. He held his hands in front of him, gripping the imaginary handle bars of a “gay-ass bike.” He kept asking me questions like: “is that comfortable?” & “where did you where did you get it?” I was incapacitated with embarrassment and confusion. I didn’t know what to say. I remember paying very close attention to that film, to our teacher explaining how the fog horn was a "narative device."
I’m writing about this not because I want a formal letter of apology from the Principle of EHS, but because seeing this forum reminds me of being a teenager and the choices I faced. My view at the time though was dramatic and self-centered. These kids who bullied me had no special power: we were both weak and confused. I don’t view the my time at EHS as a parable of human cruelty, but more as an thinking point on how our choice of identity and our projections on others effect who we become. I am who I am today because of the power of Dianetics…. Thank you Elron Hubbard!!
No, wait, I’m digressing…I guess my point is: in the “gay-ass bike” (that would be a sweet band name…) scenario, I was dumbfounded by the boy’s questions, and labeled them as “mean”, him as “bully” and me as a “weirdo” and a “victim.” My more I judged, the less I was able to think, and the more emotional my responses became. I believe now that we were both acting out of fear, and that we were both being weak. Thats why I just FedEx'ed him as severe goat head...
How much capacity does a young person have to choose to not act out of fear? What environments encourage more courageous behavior in teens?
Yo.
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