When I was in grade seven or eight a boy called me “faggot” while we were all changing after gym class.
I was very much a whipping boy at that time in that place. I found myself fighting more than you might expect for a pudgy, bookish kid who never really learned to tie his own hockey skates right. I won some of those fights, and I lost the rest.
Mostly I just tried to be someone not worthy of attack.
But in this case I was very near the end of my rope, and I smart-mouthed back at him that he would be the one to know. I knew what was coming. He laid into me with his fists. He was strong – in my memory he has the physique of a silverback gorilla, which seems unlikely – and I was not a fighter of any great skill. I doubled over and let him pound on my back, which, young and strong and still covered in a layer of babyish fat, was able to absorb his beating without any great injury.
My family left that town shortly thereafter for completely unrelated reasons. I still, thirty years later, wonder occasionally whether I would have lived through the next four or five years.
Flash forward half a lifetime. I received an invitation from the same fellow to join his social network. My last memory of him is of that beating, which ended only when I retreated to the hallway and thence to the school counsellor, snuffling and crying and trying to stop my hitching breath from turning into mortifying wails.
He now wishes to reconnect. This, I suppose, is the normal arc of a life – offense, time, erasure, re-encounter, absolution – but I think maybe in other times you could manage to avoid people entirely if you really wanted to, and I did. I really, really wanted to avoid him.
With social networks, however, it ceases to be possible. The best you can do, when someone asks you to join and you have no knowledge or connection or maybe you have a really good reason to hesitate, is to figure things out first.
In this case, he’d also killed someone in the intervening time. A crime of passion, you understand. A boyfriend. Killed in the heat of the moment.
But sit beside me for just a moment as these images blend together: Faggot-retort-vicious beating-dead boyfriend. In the heat of the moment.
What is the possibility that this sequence of events is the distinct arc of a relationship? I’ve only gotten properly high a few times, but my thoughts disconnected this way, distinct, golden points that all lead to the impression that there is meaning in the universe.
The main conclusion when you’re high is that being high is wicked and you should get high more often. The conclusion when your apparently murderous childhood nemesis asks for inclusion on your Facebook is less clear.
I will add a few moderating things here, in hopes of showing a kind of empathy. We were tweens. He actually was in a hard place in a hard situation when he killed that man, and also, I would imagine, when we were kids. Being gay in a Newfoundland outport can be every bit as difficult as you’d imagine it, not that I’d know about that specifically.
But you know what else? That moment in that boys’ change room is one of the sharp lines that defined the first three quarters of my life. And we had a couple of out gay boys in town already. And you know, I lived in that town too, and it nearly destroyed me too, but I managed not to kill one person before, during, or after that time.
Years later the change room incident came back to me. I was coming out of the late-night gay bar with two girls – my girlfriend at the time and a friend of ours – after spending several hours dancing in the fun, friendly, somewhat hedonistic environment of that particular club at that particular time.
There were a pair of douchebags hassling everyone who came out the door, although they left us alone, presumably because we looked just straight enough. But when they said something to the guys ahead of us, I couldn’t let well enough alone.
With the harsh echo of that faggot catcall resonating in my ears I put on an effeminate voice and said “What’s a matta, fellas, couldn’t get in?” and walked off down Water Street. They followed us for a while and eventually I told the girls to go on ahead. I turned to face them, the pounding of fists rumbling in my memory.
“You wanna go?” one of them said. In my memory he looks a lot like that young boy in the change room.
“No,” I said. They didn’t know what to do with that. We stared at each other a while.
Then they turned around and walked away. I turned back to the girls – who, bless ’em, hadn’t abandoned me – and continued on our way down the street. I realized then that I’d put them in harm’s way as well and felt bad for a moment, but marked it down at the time as a thing that had to be done.
When I looked back over my shoulder I saw the two guys walking back towards us with a third, much taller, wider fellow in tow, we decided to get ourselves a late night lunch at the cafe on the next street up, and that was the end of it.
Until the Facebook thing.
They say silence is golden. I try my damnedest to follow that notion, because I have a big mouth and a habit of sticking my foot in it while trying to be too smart for my own good. And I have a lot of fight left in me, under the years and the attempts to change.
When I got a second invitation to the social network of a person of whom I have only violent, terrible memories, I clicked Ignore.
I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a little peace from one’s personal demons now and then.
“365: 85 – 26.03.09” by Foxtongue is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
