In kindergarten, I grew so dizzy while sitting on a spinning merry-go-round that I laid my head back on the metal and closed my eyes. A few moments later, I opened my eyes and was startled to see a girl staring down at me. Then I was even more startled when she kissed me, jumped off the merry-go-round, and never kissed me again.
That merry-go-round kisser was a white girl, the daughter of white parents who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I kissed a girl for the second time in fourth grade when I leaned through her open basement-bedroom window and smashed my mouth into hers. She was a white girl, and she fell laughing back onto her bed next to her best friend, an Indian girl, who asked, “What was it like?”
“He tastes like salt,” the white girl said.
They laughed together. I ran away, fearing something was wrong with my mouth. Only much later in life, after I had kissed other girls, did I realize that the taste of salt can make a kiss pretty damn spectacular.
In fifth grade, I kissed a white girl who was a little bit Indian. Or maybe she was an Indian girl who was mostly white. In any case, on the rez, she was treated and mistreated like she was a white girl, no matter how Indian she was or was not.
I think she was the first girl I loved.
One day, at recess, she gave me a necklace. A silver cross. Then she kissed me. I realized that I had always wanted her to kiss me. That’s a powerful feeling at any point in one’s life, but it’s a naked Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil of the soul the first time you feel it.
I lived across the road from the tribal school, so I immediately ran home and asked my mother if she had a necklace I could give to my first love.
And my mother smiled, said yes, and gave me a silver necklace with a pendant-coin that featured an embossed buffalo on one side and an Indian head on the other.
That piece of jewelry was not exactly romantic, but I didn’t know any better. I guess my mother didn’t know any better either. And, despite my mother’s other major and minor crimes against me, I absolutely refuse to believe that she deliberately sabotaged her young son’s courtship effort.
Proudly swinging that half-Indian/half-buffalo necklace, I ran back to school and presented it to that mostly white girl. She accepted the gift but with a look of such obvious disdain that I turned and ran. And, as I ran, I heard her laughing with other girls, the mostly and fully Indian girls who had often laughed at me, at my thick government-provided eyeglasses, at my large hydrocephalic skull, at my epically crooked teeth, at my stutter and lisp.
I was a special-needs kid before needs were considered special. I was a kid Somewhere on the Spectrum when the spectrum was only “normal” or “not normal.” I was the Official Tribal Fool living one hundred years after fools were last thought to be holy. I was a mess, a mysterious casserole slowly going bad in a half-assed freezer. I was social carrion. I was nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other. I was uncorrected and uncorrectable. I was the Boy Who Cannot Contain His Emotions. I was the kid who could not run fast or jump high. I was the kid scared of heights on a reservation that is essentially an endless pine forest. I was the Indian who didn’t know how to swim on a reservation bordered on two sides by one great river and one damn good river. I was the Runt of the Rez.
I stole my fourth and last reservation kiss from another white girl. I was in sixth grade. She was an older woman. An eighth-grader. She was the white daughter of white teachers. And I saw her sitting on a big rock on the playground. Her eyes were closed. Her face was turned toward the October sun. I quietly climbed the rock, leaned toward her, and kissed her. She slowly opened her eyes, not surprised at all, as if she’d expected to be kissed by somebody, and said, “Never do that again.”
She was absolutely justified in judging and rebuffing me that way.
Later that same school year, I was sitting on a second flight of interior school stairs while two Indian girls sat talking on the first flight of stairs. I could hear every word they said, but they didn’t know I was listening.
They talked about their friends—all the girls they thought were the coolest and the ones who were the least cool—and then they talked about the boys they liked and the boys they loved.
I wanted to hear them talk about me, but I also wanted them not to talk about me.
“You know who you should like?” the first Indian girl asked the other Indian girl.
“Who?” she asked.
“Junior,” said the first Indian girl. She said my name. Oh, shit, she said my name.
“Junior is nice,” said the second Indian girl. “And he’s supersmart. But he is so ugly.”
I know that every person reading this has experienced that kind of romantic devastation and personal destruction. But it doesn’t make me feel any better to know that it’s a universal experience. And I hope only a few people have experienced what happened to me after that moment on the stairs.
The next day, some other Indian girls began to call me ugly. They said it to my face, in public, at school, at sporting events, at ceremonies, everywhere. When they walked by my house, they’d yell “Ugly” loud enough for me to hear it in my basement bedroom. Insulting me suddenly became a wildly popular thing to do. I’d been randomly bullied and insulted for years, but I quickly became the target of an organized harassment campaign.
So many insults, so many names.
They invented a disparagement for me that I’m embarrassed to repeat so many years later.
“Junior High Honky,” they chanted at me. “Junior High Honky. Junior High Honky.”
That’s a stupid insult, right? Inane. It hardly seems like it would be damaging. But, like water falling drop by drop onto your face for hours and days and weeks, that tiny insult slowly came to have enormous power over me.
So how did those mean girls invent that particular appellation? What is its etymology?
Junior High Honky. Junior High Honky.