Mama's Boy

My parents have always been noble, honest people with a complete lack of irony. To them the idea of making fun of another person is out of the question--it's a hurtful manipulative thing to them. They don't like it and they taught me not to like it. So in middle school when I'd come home crying, I was a victim, in their eyes, of cruelty, injustice, and the rampant degradation of morality in "these times."

From my father I learned that I could use agression and force to deal with the bullies. But I was puny and weak and didn't stand a chance against those bovine-growth-hormonal pubescent muscle jocks. I was the boy who always flinched.

From my mother I learned that I could use my honesty to fight the teasing. I could approach a teacher and honestly say what I'd been told by the kids. Nothing was respected less than a tattler in W. R. Thomas Middle School, so I refrained.

During the school day I avoided most social contact within the windowless walls of the institution. After school I cried at the names I'd been called and the jokes that'd been made at my expense, which really were funny now that I think of them. Back then my mother still dressed me so I wore these cumbersome button down shirts, short-sleeved with strange pastel prints on them that have never been resurrected since the late eighties. And pants. I wore lots of pants. Nice pants. TOO nice for public school when other kids were wearing old t-shirts and jeans. Oh, and brown mocassins, which today I can't even look at without having nightmarish visions of a preppie teenage hell. Poster child for the Sears Catalog?

And the best reason to make fun of me was that I was so scared using a locker would make me late for class that I carried two bookbags, for all my books and binders and school supplies...at all times. Walking home from school I'd be carrying the two bags, my magenta tupperware lunchbox and my french horn. My forearms were strong.

I'd get home, forearms pulsing with blood, neck strained from the load, and cry about the day's teasings. One evening, mom couldn't take it anymore. She thought I was being traumatized by the other students and she decided, without telling me, that she would take matters into her own hands.

The next day I was staring at my English teacher guiding us through the symbolism in the Eternity commercials by David Lynch when my name was called on the PA system. To the principal's office for the first time EVER. I was mortified. What had I done?

When I got to the office there were the 4 boys I would sit with at lunch time, the principal, and my mother.

The principle had me face my bullies and confess what they'd said to me and explain to them how it hurt my feelings. So, slowly, with trepidation, I confessed. The principal turned my confession into an accusation. The kids, all 4 boys, were suspended from school for a week, and for that week I sat by myself at lunch. And after that week, none of the boys would talk to me. Alone. A lone eater--the worst social status possible in middle school. Those kids--the "bullies"--were actually my friends, but I didn't know that friends could tease each other and still be friends.