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His school days are years in the past, but cruel comments by unthinking teens bring the pain of bullying back for Michael Copperman.
I’m nearly home after a long run through North Portland, up and down the swoop of hills, the streets of two-story townhouses with shuttered windows and old trees with overhanging branches. It’s late afternoon, hot and humid, and I’m tired, ready to be home. As I pass a house with a high porch I become aware of eyes, two teenage girls in crop tops peering down, hair bleached nearly white and shorn and teased to sharp bangs. Their features are barely visible beneath thick eye-make-up and foundation and mascara, but they are thin, the pretty girls no doubt, who learn early the importance of appearances. One of them begins to heckle me, perhaps showing out for her friend. “Come on, now, hup-two! Faster, buddy! Looking good– NOT!”
It is not what she says that strikes me, though her willingness to mock a grown man in his thirties would seem to have something to do with my being brown, perhaps Asian or Latino. No, it is her voice I notice: she speaks with the strident, syrupy assurance of a mean girl, at once cajoling and belittling, into me like a blade beneath my skin. Recently, I was telling a white friend of mine about an older white man yelling “Hola!” to me on the bike path, noting that I didn’t know whether he was being racist or just offensively friendly, and he suggested that perhaps the man was ‘just trying to be nice.’ I responded that there are better ways to be nice to ethnically ambiguous Americans than to speak to them in a poor accent in what one assumes to be their ‘native’ tongue, just as there are better ways to acknowledge an attractive woman than a whistle or catcall, that it’s easy to recognize actual appreciation or friendliness. This girl’s heckling has an edge—there’s something ugly in the need to go further than sarcasm. She intends her words to do harm.
I let them settle over me, feel a flush of blood rise to my cheeks, and suddenly I am back at the playground at Washington Elementary. I was the shortest boy in a white, blue-collar school, the only Asian, and hopelessly brainy. I wore knee-high rubber boots to school, and had never heard of Michael Jackson or Paula Abdul, as my father forbid television and my parents listened to old Beatles and Janis Joplin records; I didn’t understand what anyone was talking about when they made references to shows, pop stars, actors, cartoons. Mostly, I was silent, as I didn’t know what to say to anyone else, and my quiet invited derision, allowed kids to project onto me whatever identity they wanted, and this was the age of Sweet Sixteen and Long Dong’s foppish cry of “Heyyy, sexy girlfriend!”, a time before anyone even talked of problematic portrayals of Asian-Americans. Sometimes, I heard the calls of “Ching-Chong!” as I passed groups of kids in the hallways and lunchroom, but too I may have imagined some of the torment, as if every private conversation were necessarily about my difference. At any rate, I had no friends or allies; I walked the fences alone at recess, looking for pieces of obsidian glinting in the light, which I collected as treasures in the toe of my right boot. There was no mistaking the direct hostility of the bullies, mostly boys but also girls, who called out racial slurs and pushed me in the chest; never one to suffer a bully, I fought them all, no-matter how big, though nothing I did with my fists erased the shame of being vulnerable, of having to stand alone.
◊♦◊
Last year, I ran into a guy name Travis who I wrestled with for a short time in high school. He hasn’t aged well, his face puffed with beer and weathered with the hard living of working the mills—it was hard to believe he was younger than me. As we talked, I remembered his pop who came to the meets sometimes, a little drunk and crazy-eyed, how the man screamed and cursed when Travis made a mistake. By the time I knew Travis I was in high school, had armored my body in muscle, trying to make myself impervious. He touched my arm before he left, and then, quick and quiet like he was telling a secret, he told me about the time he’d come to train in the high school room when he was a little eighth grader, slim-shouldered and weak before his growth spurt, while I was older and established. A bunch of guys were picking on him because he was so tiny and because his wrestling shoes had holes in them. “Guess you saw it, what was happening,” he said. “And you come across the room, you who was always quiet, and you took the kid who was pushing my face into the mat and tossed him off, and you stood over him and the other two guys who’d been after me and said, ‘Anybody picks on him will answer to me.’ And you know, nobody touched me again.” I can’t remember the incident at all, but I believe it happened like Travis said.
I still don’t like bullies. I still want the small and weak to stay free from harm. But too often, there’s nobody there to help.
One weekend night downtown, I ran at four thick-shouldered, tattooed men out looking for trouble who’d drawn a young international student off by himself to assault him; by the time I neared, he was on the ground and they were kicking him. When they ran from me I was surprised, until I saw that two guys behind me in line at a food cart had seen me take off and followed my lead. I helped the boy to his feet, but I was disappointed. It is not that I hunger for a fight so much as that those rare times the demons of the past present; I would like to get a lick in even if only under idiot odds, at the price of a beating—I can take physical blows. What exacts a price is the self-inflicted toll: how I will stand with arms crossed in a crowd of strangers and stay apart, offer nothing to connect with or be judged by, even when I have something to contribute. How I will catch myself reflected in passing in a mirror, and see myself as I am– well-dressed, fit, perhaps even handsome– and be shocked, since in my mind’s eye I am a small, fierce boy backed against a fence, the toe of my rubber boot filled with beautiful useless treasure. How at a bar, I will look away when a pretty girl meets my eye, imagining it an accident and afraid to confirm what I suspect, which is that she couldn’t have meant it for me, that “NOT!” is imminent.
And now here I am, and here are these young girls looking down on me from the perch of their high porch, and I almost turn and say, “Stop! Don’t pick on people to make yourself feel stronger.”
But these are just children who are probably bored, who are probably powerless in other parts of their lives, and I am grown and don’t need to defend myself anymore. So I keep walking like I never heard anything.
Photo: Ian Sane/Flickr
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