[“I grew up in a rural New England mill town. When you say “rural New England," people think of postcards of church steeples pointing solemnly toward blue, blue skies that arch over vistas of colorful autumn leaves. They imagine those nice people who model clothes in the L. L. Bean catalogs. They remember those oil paintings reproduced in Yankee magazine, where quaint clapboard farmhouses provide the focal point for landscapes of rolling, snow- covered hills.
I guess you could see things like that, here and there, in the area in which I grew up, but that's not how I remember it. I think of a family down the road from us- a mother, grandmother, and seven children— living in a two- room shack that had originally been built as a chicken coop. If I close my eyes I can still see those children, especially the girls, blue lipped, shivering at the bus stop, their faded dresses starched as stiff as paper, and just as thin. I remember their landlord, the man who owned the slaughterhouse. Collecting for the Red Cross, I pedaled my bicycle out the dirt lane to his farm, and after I explained why I had come, he took a five-dollar bill out of his pocket and threw it in a puddle. “There," he said. “You want charity? You can crawl in the mud for it." Those are the kinds of things I remember: poverty and ignorance, cruelty and smug intolerance.
I was not a native of the area in which I was raised, which meant that I was relentlessly persecuted from a tender age. My brother and I did not look like our neighbors, nor did we act like them. We grew up in a house containing more books than did all the village libraries put together, and our parents insisted that we speak grammatically passable English. This did not make us popular.
I am not talking here about a little teasing. I am talking about years and years of being beaten up at school, on the school bus, and at the bus stop. I am talking about being attacked by six or ten people, being shoved down flights of concrete stairs, of eyeglasses being smashed, of kicks and karate chops, of hate notes signed by an entire class. It was brutal. It was like going to war every day with no gun and no ammunition. My brother and I became very good street fighters. We did not follow precisely the Marquis of Queensberry rules, but we learned that good, swift moves— brutal, savage maneuvers— might dissuade at least some of our attackers from getting too close.
We were not the only ones who were so tormented. There were a handful of Jewish children, a tongue-tied girl, an obese brother and sister, an effeminate boy, and a couple of kids who smelled bad. We were all pariahs, for whatever reasons, and because of the intensity of the hatred we suffered, we were not able to band together. Any one of us, alone, was a potential victim, but any two of us, even my brother and I, were like a target flashing a large and brightly demarcated bull's-eye.
We, the hated, did not get to know each other well, although on occasion, over the years, we exchanged furtive, sympathetic glances. It's not that we were not interested in one another. I spent minutes at a time, when I could, gazing at these children, my brothers and sisters in oppression, trying to understand what was so terribly wrong with us, why we were treated so cruelly. I paid special attention to the effeminate boy, because my deepest, darkest secret— the one thing about me that my attackers never seemed quite clever enough to discern— was that I, even though I was a girl, was somehow just like him.
In that town, a poor community crushed and corrupted by the inexorable contraction of its inadequate mill-town economy, having a cunt was the only real measure of femininity. Of course the girls, by eleven or twelve, would learn to pad their breasts, tease and lacquer their hair skyward, and lard a thick layer of makeup over their faces, but that was just an announcement of availability. Life was too harsh for daintiness to be required of women. They were generally a coarse, tough lot, and my flagrant butchness didn't stand out.
But I knew. I knew I was different, and I knew that if anyone else suspected it, the abuse I would suffer would make my former persecution pale in comparison.
In my town, homosexuality was the deadliest sin. Bestiality, wife and child beating, incest, and rape were tolerated with a raunchy good humor that might have made a respectable nonresident blanch or retch.
For instance, we had a town rapist whose identity was known to everyone. If a woman was stupid enough to be waylaid by him, well, to the town folks it was obvious that she got what she deserved. When one of the farming families won more than their share of blue ribbons at the county fair, it was explained, with a nudge and a wink, as the predictable result of how satisfied that family's cows were, given how dutifully the sons made sure the herd was well fucked.
I attended school with more than one product of father-daughter and brother-sister unions, and a couple of my schoolmates became pregnant by their fathers. These were not secrets. They were not spoken of in whispers. Delicacy was a luxury the townspeople could not afford, and so I knew just how every peccadillo was regarded. One could break bread with a rapist, a cow fucker, or a man who beat his wife and kids. These activities were the stuff of jokes, but nothing to get too upset about. Homosexuality, which I never heard referred to by such a polite or positive term, was a predilection that deserved beating, rape, castration, and/ or murder, as far as my neighbors were concerned.
In so hostile an atmosphere, I took the safest course. I did not, quite, admit to myself what I was, and I certainly did not act on it, until I was safely out of high school and out of town. I didn't wait a moment longer than I had to (within four months of graduation I had managed to sleep with my first woman) but while growing up I hid it even from myself, although I spent hours crying about this unnamed propensity. Still, in that effeminate boy I saw myself. He provided the only hope I had that perhaps I was not utterly alone in my predicament. His existence was like a whisper in the wind, a small voice telling maybe, just maybe, I was not the only one. In that dark world of loneliness and terror, he provided my only hope. God might goof once, I reasoned, but if God had made two of us in one small town, maybe it wasn't an error at all. Maybe we were like albinos or double-pawed cats, unusual but not unique. Maybe, somewhere out there, there were more of us.
My fantasy was that there was someone, somewhere out in the world beyond my hometown, who could love me. The effeminate boy made me hopeful of this. I worried that even then, as he and I were being harangued and beaten, she was somewhere else, suffering similar punishments for being like us.
At night when I said my prayers, after I had prayed for my family and our pets, I would say a special prayer for this faceless girl, praying that she would have the strength to survive her childhood, praying that we would both survive and someday find one another. I knew that I had to be strong and savvy. I knew that I could not expect her to keep her end of the bargain if I did not keep mine.
As hard as my existence was, as much as I longed to put a chain around my neck, as my brother had, and try to end my life, I knew that I had to survive, that I had to not fail her, wherever she was and whatever she was going through.”]
stormborns
dededos
izzy806
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
