Bullied - Part 1

“The sense of being unwanted has always been for me acutely painful. The sensation is reverberative and seems to attach itself to the last link in a chain made up of all similar experiences. The voices in the cast were loud and scornful, and there I was, buck naked, somewhere in the middle of the city and unwanted, remembering missed football tackles, lost fights, the contempt of strangers, the sound of laughter from behind shut doors.”

-- John Cheever, “The Fourth Alarm”

[Upon discharge from the hospital after my manic episode in September 1986, I was directed to go to Concord Counseling Services in Westerville, Ohio. I had no money or insurance but Concord operated on a sliding fee scale, which was, in my case, three dollars per session. I was assigned a psychiatrist and a therapist. Among the first things they noticed about me was that, when asked to give my family and personal history, I described the most horrible episodes in a flat, matter of fact tone bereft of emotional content. The therapist, an LISW named Linda (who was just two years older than me), spent most of our sessions trying to get me to open up emotionally—or more precisely, to access my emotions in the first place. She gave me an assignment….]

My job in this essay is to describe pain, personal pain: what it felt like, when it happened, why it happened, how I reflect on it after the passage of time; in effect, to relive those moments (or, in most cases, epochs) of pain: an intrinsically unpleasant task. I suppose that almost all the pain I’ve felt in my lifetime has occurred within the context of relationships. I can’t help but think that this marks me out as fortunate. I’ve known almost nothing of the pain that comes from bad health, a lost job, or the failure to achieve some desperately desired goal. When I think of some of the suffering I’ve witnessed secondhand—of Laverne J., for instance, a 62-year old woman slipping toward dementia, living alone in one room of a decrepit frame house with a coffee warmer to cook one, no bath or shower, and only cardboard boxes for furniture; or of a five-day old baby I saw in Zaire, shaking like a poisoned mouse, dying of umbilical tetanus because his mother had swaddled him in a cloth contaminated with goat dung; or the beggars in Kenya who showed me mangled limbs and endlessly repeated, “Saidia” [Help]—well, the suffering of a 26-year old writer who thinks himself unlovable seems rather thin tea.

On the other hand, pain is pain, and although it comes in many patterns and degrees of intensity it is surely fruitless to argue that one man’s pain is legitimate while another’s is self-indulgent or trivial. The labels are irrelevant. Trying to be objective about pain is like trying to see a planet from all sides at once: you can only view it from your personal angle of vision. The task is inherently subjective.

[NB. Notice the reflexive effort to intellectualize the issue rather than grapple with the emotions that attach to pain, which is the point of the assignment.]

Compiling an exhaustive survey of painful episodes would be time-consuming, highly depressing, and probably without purpose. Better to concentrate on three or four incidents and let it go at that: a sort of private hit parade of suffering.

Sixth Grade

I never liked school very well and for many years the return of school disquieted me as I associated it with my annual return to the classroom. The Sixth Grade was more or less the worst, for reasons having chiefly to do with a classmate named Stephen Quayle. Even today I can’t see Stephen except through the eyes of an eleven-year old. He was only an inch taller than me but outweighed me by a considerable margin: not fat, but dense-packed and very strong for his age. He was the most intimidating individual I have ever encountered. Almost from the beginning of the school year he seized on me as a victim and he didn’t let up for months. He teased me mercilessly. Other children had teased me before and others would do so later, but for some reason Stephen had the sort of genius for choosing words and inflection that made him an absolute torment.

It began with the way I crossed my legs. Instead of crossing one leg at right angles to the other I let it hook over almost parallel. Stephen thought it was feminine and sissy and started hissing at me about it in math class. It rattled the hell out of me; I’ve no idea why. It had never occurred to me that it was feminine at all—I’d seen plenty of men cross their legs the same way. In fact, I vividly recall sitting down to TV a few nights later and seeing Richard Burton—Richard Burton, the sexual conquistador of Liz Taylor!—cross his legs in exactly the same way I had done. But by then I was convinced: real men cross their legs perpendicular to one another. I was slightly scandalized that Burton did it the other way, and although I accorded him the option, for myself I never again crossed my legs in any but the Stephen Quayle-prescribed manner. I still don’t.

Stephen very quickly decided I was an easy target and no day went by when he didn’t rag men about something. He was amazing in his ability to find something wrong with my clothes, speaking voice, mannerisms, vocabulary, anything—and I was amazing in my ability to counter anything he said. He literally dumbfounded me. He razzed me about things I had never given a second thought to in my entire life, and for some reason I was uniquely vulnerable to everything he said. I suppose I should have slugged him, except that he would have relished the chance to smash me up physically as well as verbally (he shoved me around on the playground anyway), and so slugging him would only have completed my ruin.

I suppose it bothered me that this went on day after day without any adult taking any notice whatever; or if they did, to scold Stephen in a tone that said: “I’m rebuking you because I have to, but I think as little of this skinny little sissy as you do.” Teachers can be like that. It’s amazing how readily they conform themselves to the social pecking order established by the students, even in Sixth Grade.