And comebacks: “Sticks and stones may break my bones…”
The bus ride to Nativity is only fifteen minutes, but in that time the alternative lyrics to every television theme song ever are revealed. “Come and listen to a story ’bout a man named Jed, dumb mothesucker wore a rubber on his head…” I don’t recognize the compound word that follows “dumb” or even if I heard it correctly. Nor do I know why Jed would wear one of Ned Zupke’s galoshes on his head. But I instinctively recognize the epithet as a swear word and thus never to be repeated.
The bus introduces me to another bad word, and I realize from the reaction that this one is the worst of all. “Daniel Boone was a man, was a biiig man! But the bear was bigger so he ran like a nigger up a tree.” It is met with a hush, a shaming silence. Even the radio seems to pause in mid-Zeppelin. In that excruciating interval of quiet, my armpits ignite, and not for the last time. I’ll hear the word again, replacing “tiger” in “Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe,” and it will have the same effect. Dad has impressed on each of his children that we’re no better than anybody else and are often a great deal worse. He coached the baseball team while stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. When the team bus stopped en route to games at Fort Hood in Texas, black players were often denied service in restaurants. “So of course we all refused to eat there,” Dad says. “These were United States servicemen.” Like many of Dad’s other attributes—his neatness, his self-discipline, his love of black coffee—his embrace of equality was confirmed in the integrated army. He often laments the end of the draft. At the sight of any of our unmade beds he always says with a shake of his head, “A couple of years in the army would do you good.”
On the school playground, whenever two boys fight—and it is always two boys, never two girls—a crowd forms a circle and chants, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” On occasion, when a teacher comes to break it up, she finds the boys lying on their bellies, arm-wrestling, and the teacher will shake her head and walk away, to howls of derisive laughter.
More often the fights are real, and the animal aggression on display is scary and thrilling, not least because every fight can conceivably end with The Sniper driving up at high speed, the El Camino throwing up dust and gravel, scattering the chanting children at ringside.
You see his left leg first. It swings out of the cab of the El Camino, ring of keys on his hip jangling like a jailer’s. The Sniper is silent, save for the clinking of the keys, which he stills with a hand that looks like it’s reaching for a holster. Plank palmed, thick fingered, eyes unblinking behind aviator glasses, The Sniper has many violent tools at his disposal: dust mop, steel bucket, rotary floor buffer. But the greatest of these is the El Camino, whose grille, it’s been said, has taken out a dozen or more students, victims of The Sniper’s vehicular homicide. The mere sight of that grille, glinting in the distance, is enough to break up most fights.
But The Sniper can’t be everywhere. One afternoon on the playground across the street from our house I hear a public-school kid say the word “jigaboo.” I don’t know what it means. When I idly say it out loud at the dinner table that night, Dad abruptly stops buttering his baked potato, a silence falls over the kitchen, and my ears begin to burn in dread. Pausing in mid-chew, he points his butter knife at me like a bayonet.
“I better never hear that word again,” he says. “Is that understood?”
“Yes,” I say without understanding.
This cultural sensitivity is not applied equally to all. When Viet Nam is reunited as Vietnam and refugees from that country almost immediately begin to arrive in Bloomington, Amy becomes best friends with one of them, a classmate named Oanh, pronounced like “Juan,” who attends Nativity with her two younger siblings. Dad collectively calls them, with abiding affection, “Oanh, Two, and Twee.”
At age six, it only suggests to me that words exist to be stretched and kneaded like Silly Putty, the way a butterfly can flutter by. Allowed to stay up late one night, I hear someone on The Tonight Show describe Elizabeth Taylor as having “more chins than a Chinese phone book.” Dad hears me laugh, sees my delight, but says nothing. Months later, after a Northwest Orient 747 safely returns him to Bloomington from Hong Kong, he walks into the house, kisses Mom, opens his briefcase, and silently hands me a sheaf of onionskin pages torn from the telephone directory in his hotel room. Here are all the Chins in a Chinese phone book, and I clutch the paper to my chest as if it’s a treasure map.
First grade. 1972. The alphabet is displayed on the wall of our classroom, uppercase and lowercase letters written between two solid lines with a dashed line running along the middle, like a road seen from above, so that the ABCs appear to be perpetually stuck in traffic. I’m an idling letter myself, seated here in alphabetical order between Roxanne Riebel and Joe Saleck, stifling yawns, staring out the window to the range of snow mountains on the edge of the parking lot, where the plow has piled it high.
As we inch agonizingly toward recess—twice a day, midmorning and after lunch—the second hand of the clock above the blackboard slows down, taking perverse pleasure in its sluggish laps.
The bell, when it finally rings, is the same bell that sends the horses from their chutes at the Kentucky Derby, and with much the same effect. We fly out of the classroom, down the hall, through the double doors, and into the parking lot to play King of the Mountain. The older boys throw the younger and smaller boys off the top of the snow hills. A routine repeats itself for twenty minutes: I ascend to the summit, get dwarf-tossed off by a fifth-grader, and begin to make another icy ascent of this parking-lot Everest. The air is thick with flying children. We are frightened, thrilled, adrenalized, alive—sliding down on the fronts of our fur-fringed parkas like penguins.
Other days at recess we play Smear the Queer, in which the holder of a football is chased by an amped-up mob of shrieking schoolchildren until he—for it is only ever boys—throws the ball away in fear or disappears beneath a writhing pile of winter coats and flying fists, the blows softened by mittens, the screams of the dispossessed ball carrier muted by his own scarf. Lying at the bottom of such a pile, gagged by my Vikings scarf, it occurs to me: this is why they call it a muffler.