I am twelve years old, standing under the starfruit tree, eating a starfruit, thinking about blowing up the school, humming a song written by the Jewish prophet Isaiah, holding all these contradictions in my head and not knowing that they are contradictions, waiting for my beating; and then it arrives.
But not the way I think it will.
Because usually when McKinnick finds me to beat me, he brings Jones and Dodd and Graves with him. They make a circle, a loose circle at first, and they yell obscenities and push me from one of them to another and sometimes push me down and kick me and make me get back up so they can push me some more, but then the circle tightens and McKinnick slaps my ears, hard, with his open palm. First my ears ring, and then I lose most of my hearing and it doesn’t come back for a couple of hours, and when it does, it comes back with louder ringing and an awful headache. Then Jones and Dodd and Graves hold me and slap the top of my head and stick their spit-moistened fingers into my ears and nostrils while McKinnick stands over me and flicks the cartilage at the tiptops of my ears with his fingers until the cartilage turns purple, and he keeps asking if I’ve had enough, and when I say yes, he says, “No, you haven’t,” and when I say no, he says, “You need to get some humility, boy,” or, “Who do you think you’re talking to, boy,” or, “Say I’m a dirty nigger. Say it. Say it.” And then I say it—“I’m a dirty nigger”—or—“I’m a queer, I’m a homo”—or—“I fuck my mother”—or whatever other thing he wants me to say, but even then it doesn’t stop. Drew McKinnick knows how to hurt a person a hundred ways and more, and there is nothing in the world funnier, so far as I can tell, to Jones and Dodd and Graves than to hold my arms while McKinnick lifts up my shirt and grabs my nipples between his thumb and forefinger and tries to turn them one-hundred-and-eighty degrees (this he calls a One-Eighty), or to hold my arms and legs, to hold my whole body up in the air while McKinnick slaps at my testicles like he did my ears, with an open palm.
I’m waiting for that. I’m waiting for all that to happen.
But that’s not what happens. What happens is I hear my name—“Minor”—and I hear it behind me, from the direction of the band room, where the Sonshine Fellowship meets to pray and sing. I turn around. It’s McKinnick, and he’s alone. And the fact of this — his aloneness — is more terrifying to me than anything I have ever seen or heard or known or imagined in my entire life.
I am deeply, deeply afraid.
McKinnick starts running, takes off at a sprint, and I turn, too, and start to run. But I am very slow. I get five steps, maybe, and he tackles me from behind.
I fall face-first on the asphalt. I catch myself with my hands, and my right hand goes through the starfruit on its way down and rips fresh wounds into my hands, and those wounds are bathed in a tiny new pool of citric acid.
McKinnick is on top of me. He mounts me from behind, starts slapping my ears. “How’s that?” he says, and slaps and slaps and slaps and slaps, gets a rhythm going. He reaches into my pants and grabs hold of my underwear with his hand and jerks the cotton into my anus, and pulls, and pulls. I am already bleeding. I can feel the warmth.
McKinnick says, “How’s that? You like that? You feel it burn? Burn, baby, burn!” He pulls my underwear up and down and from side to side.
He says, “You know what? I could ass rape you right now and no one would know. And if they found out, it’s you would be the faggot, not me. You hear me, faggot? Are you listening?”
What does it feel like? It is the most helpless feeling in the world. No one will come for me. If I try to tell on him — as I have done in the past — no one will believe me. I am at his mercy, and I am not sure he has any.
All I can do is go someplace else, to that band room, to Wednesday mornings, 6:30 am, where I am singing — where we are singing — the words of the prophet Isaiah: You shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you. There will be shouts of joy, and all the trees of the fields will clap their hands, will clap their hands.
That, and this: I will grow up to become a person who will be able to make things like this not happen to other people. And I will tell this story. This story. I will make sure everyone knows.
And here I must interrupt the thoughts of my twelve-year-old self to tell you, reader, that I did not grow up to become a person who could keep things like this from happening to other people. And until this moment, this moment I am sharing with you, I did not grow up to tell this story. I tried, a few times, and less and less as years went by, to tell this story. But no friend ever wanted to hear this story. The past, they would say, is the past. Or: That was a long time ago. Get over it. Or: Nobody likes victim stories. And, most often, they would say nothing at all. They would just be very quiet — I could tell, always, from the looks on their faces, that I had made them very uncomfortable by sharing even the opening words of this confidence. I had revealed myself to be a very, very strange and disturbed individual.
I stopped trying to tell the story. I grew up, instead, to become a preacher. Briefly a preacher. Less than two years a preacher. And while I was a preacher I was befriended by a Palm Beach Gardens city worker, a meter reader named Tony Griffin, and it is important to know that Tony Griffin was black and that he was especially sensitive to racial issues, and that I was not — trained as I was, at this school, to not believe in any kind of legacy of racism in America, to believe that any talk of race was necessarily a crutch, an excuse used by black people unwilling to work hard, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and all that. Tony and I had a falling out over this very issue. He was part of a small group of single people in their twenties and thirties who met at my house on Thursday nights to pray and read the Bible and play video games, mostly Madden Football ’99, on my Sony PlayStation. And Tony was sure that the people in the group — all of them white but him — had turned against him because he was black. I was convinced that this charge was completely unfounded, and conceded that possibly the others were growing impatient because they disliked his habit of interrupting the PlayStation games to put kung fu movies in the VCR. So we broke off our friendship, Tony and I, over race and video games and kung fu movies. And then I quit being a preacher, decided to be a writer, lived in my car for a while.
I kept a cell phone, though, and one afternoon two years later it rang — I was near Orlando — and I saw Tony Griffin on the caller ID, and I answered and was glad to hear his voice until he said, “I’m calling because I have leukemia.” And then I was making trips to West Palm Beach every couple of months to visit him in Hospice. And then we had another falling out. I didn’t know that leukemia was a disease of the immune system, and I had a cold, and I came to visit, and I coughed as I walked through the door, and Tony threw a cup of red jello at my head and said, “Motherfucker! You come in here with a cold!” I left the room as fast as I could and closed the door behind me, and I heard something else hit the door, and then: “I don’t ever want to see your ass again until I’m dead and you’re standing over my wooden box.” I honored his wishes for a year, and then his niece called and said, “Come quick, he’s got two days.”