Boyhood

I was that kid, the one who during free time when everyone else chose to play with each other and run around, instead found his way over to the bowl of clay to build sculptures in isolation or peruse the class library for another world to get lost in. I was so satisfied and absorbed by the world growing inside of my head that I don’t remember uttering a significant word until I made it to third grade. I had thoughts much faster than I had words to describe them so I spent most of my childhood reading books and gathering the vocabulary that would one day be as large as my imagination.

My parents were always concerned about me making friends and once inquired about my budding relationships. I told them that Brian Jacques and R.L. Stine were two guys that I really got along with, failing to mention that those were authors. They seemed satisfied by that answer. One day, as I was observing the world in slow motion, half seeing, half dreaming, and working up the nerve to introduce myself to a new arrival named J.K. Rowling, some girl in my class poked me in my soft, and pudgy chest.

“Hey, white boy,” she jeered.

At that moment I was shocked into self-awareness. No longer was I simply a passive observer of the human condition, but I was a participant in this space; I became aware of my physical form, feelings and fears. In her touch and in her words she brought into being a boy that understood his existence as opposite and separate from the world and its inhabitants. Her finger exposed the feminine softness of my skin. I felt more akin to her in my body than I did the other boys around me. She poked me where I was most insecure. Boys shouldn’t have soft chests, girls did. Boys had six packs and flat pecks and no fat on them. She exposed my secret.

Not only had her touch defined me but also her words. She called me “white boy.” As far as my sensory perception could be trusted, both her and I shared a similar tone of skin. I was well beyond the point in my education of learning colors. I was certain that although we differed in hue and value, the tones of both our skins fell under the umbrella of brown. We were both somewhere in between Chestnut and Raw Umber (whatever that was) in the crayon box. Although I did occasionally associate with Robin’s Egg Blue, in no universe that I had encountered either in fiction or reality had the colors white and brown been mistaken. So I knew that she was naming me not by my body, but by an even more intimate category.

I could, with Herculean effort, get over her discovering my soft overfed body, but what harmed me even more permanently for years to come was the new identity she imposed on my worldview. Although her and I shared skin, she assessed that I was unlike her and unlike all of our other classmates that looked like us. What I previously knew both about my body and my mind could no longer be trusted. I was not lean enough to be quite masculine, and I didn’t speak, think or value things in a way that associated me with my black peers. With three words and the touch of a finger, she shattered my reality.

Reeling from the obliteration of my ego, I could only respond by swiping away her accusatory finger while giving her the most reproachful glare I could muster, my fragmented pride barely holding the expression. She was Shiva the Destroyer, who in a whim could erase the universe with the point of a finger. She was Brahma the Creator whose voice could create life. She broke me and made me over again, just as I had turned a shapeless clay mass into a stegosaurus earlier during free time. All I could do was accept the immense power she had exerted over my existence.

I came home that day feeling like the soggy cereal I had eaten for breakfast. I silently asked for some way to regain what I had lost. Then like a prayer answered and proof positive of all the milk I used to drink, I woke up the next morning with my legs dangling over a newly crushed twin sized bed. I was now aged 13, 6 foot 3 inches tall, 205 lbs and as disoriented and insecure as ever.