Category Archives: Childhood

Teddy in a Dress, Broadway Joe in the Toilet

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By J.C. Schildbach, MA, LMHC, ASOTP

As with so many largely pointless childhood stories, the exact why and how of Mego Joe Namath ending up in the toilet are lost to time, blurred in a haze of retelling and embellishment, and perhaps a heavy dose of blame-shifting.

I’ve always carried a sense that whatever bad happens to me, I am somehow deserving of it, usually because I can trace a path through the exact actions I took that led to the consequences. When it comes to arguments with siblings, those paths are usually pretty clear.

With Mego Joe Namath, the clarity’s not there, perhaps due to my own desire to forget.

Mego was a company that once largely had the corner on the action-figure market, manufacturing all of the DC and Marvel superhero dolls, most of which were crafted with identical bodies—the hands, feet, and heads the only variable parts—with clingy, fabric, footy-pajama-like costumes to provide the rest of the customization. Anyone familiar with Cartoon Network’s “Robot Chicken” has seen plenty of Mego toys.

Mego Joe Namath, who had a decidedly different style of dress compared to the superheroes, was a birthday gift from my paternal grandmother. It was totally unexpected, given that she usually only sent cards with checks or cash for birthdays, and a Hickory Farms gift pack as a family gift at Christmas—something that, to this day, makes it mandatory for me to include summer sausage in my Christmas Eve festivities. Mego Joe Namath was also totally unexpected because I had zero interest in football—and may not have even known who Joe Namath was at the time.

Broadway Joe ponders the great mysteries of memory and intent.

Broadway Joe ponders the great mysteries of memory and intent.

I like to attribute my sense of confusion over the story of Mego Joe Namath to my grandmother’s penchant for revisionist history, as if some of her mojo got on that Joe Namath doll, and made it impossible for me to own up to the specifics of what happened. A refugee, along with my grandfather, to the U.S. of A. just prior to WWII, grandma squished and squashed the family history into something palatable for that era, and then for a later era, the story always holding too many contradictory elements for anybody who knew more than the small slice she was dishing up at any particular time. And, I should also note, I don’t know that grandma was the source of the stories. I just don’t know who else to blame.

In Grandma’s telling, we came from a line of German barons, low-level royalty of sorts, but we were also Jews, dodging Hitler by changing our name from Schildberg to Schildbach.  I’m not sure which part of the story is harder to swallow–that a Jewish family attained noble status in Germany, or that our family’s heavy Lutheran leanings were born of a conversion of convenience–a cover story that resulted in such a complete abandonment of our heritage that the family attended church–well, religiously–and my father became a pastor. We were Nazi fighters, or fighters of Nazis.  Or perhaps we were communist fighters, or fighters of communists. And maybe, just maybe, we were Nazis fighting the communists, or vice versa. However it turns and churns, we were never whatever was bad.

And whatever happened, the family got out of Germany at a pretty good time to get…so hooray for not ending up dead for some political or religious leaning or another.

The shifts in my rememberances and interpretations of the Mego Joe Namath saga could also be attributed to my last memories of my grandmother. She had come to visit my mother’s home around Christmastime during my college years. Before I made it home for the holiday break, my younger brother had already sent notice that grandma was spending most of her time in front of the TV complaining—frequently about communists and gay people—and this was in the days before Fox News. I can only imagine what mainlining such misappropriated anger would have done for her, when a news story about the Soviet Union would send her into a grumble about how we don’t need communists on the TV at Christmas, or seeing Brian Boitano in Olympic trials would launch her into a confused rant about how “they” had accused one of my cousins of being gay—maybe she meant the United States Figure Skating Association, although that seems unlikely.

At some point, I conflated these late memories of my grandmother with why she ever would have sent me a Joe Namath doll in the first place. I figured that maybe, in my early primary school years, she had become concerned because, along with my girly curly hair, penchant for art projects, and general lack of interest in sports, I carted around a dress-wearing teddy bear named Cindy. Grandma may have decided that the antidote to such anti-masculine behavior was a doll that played football. And, speaking of things I really don’t remember, I’m not sure where the teddy bear came from, or why I was convinced it was female and asked my mom to make a dress for it, but I suspect that my sister had a strong hand in all of it.

It was also by my sister’s hand that Joe Namath ended up in the toilet. I’m sure there were numerous warnings leading up to the actual toilet incident. I just don’t remember the triggering event. It could have been that I snuck into her bedroom while she was in the shower, and played 45s on her portable record player. I thought maybe it had something to do with me stealing her Sunshine Family Farm chicken again, so I could make fart noises as I made it squeeze out eggs—but the timeline for that toy’s release placed it far too late to match up with Mego Joe’s trip to the pool. It may have been that I stole Sunshine Family dad’s sweater, so that Mego Joe Namath would have something to wear other than his football outfit—a likely possibility, given that, while Joe’s shirt went into the toilet with him, he was not wearing it.

Chances are, the event that led to Joe taking the plunge was little more than my bragging about how grandma had sent me a present but hadn’t sent one to my sister…or some other antagonistic foolishness…singing an annoying commercial jingle over and over again, calling her names, suggesting she was in love with somebody…I could be pretty damn annoying with very little effort. I can’t remember if the event took place in one fell swoop, with my sister grabbing up the doll and accessories and dropping them all in the toilet, or if it happened in stages, with me refusing to give up whatever it was I was doing that was annoying her, as she dropped items of clothing into the toilet, one by one, finally plopping Joe in as the final measure.

There is also the matter of just who hit the handle on the toilet, flushing as much as would go down—which I think was only Joe’s shirt, football, and helmet—maybe one of his shoes, too. Joe himself was spared the trip to the sewer by dint of his size, or positioning–an inability to navigate the crooks of the toilet piping.

I have a vague recollection, obscured by the lies that took place in its wake, of staring down at Joe in the toilet after my sister stomped triumphantly out of the bathroom, evil grin on her face, or maybe with her standing right there, relishing my disbelief. And as I looked, and imagined having to fish him out of the toilet to clean and dry him off, and admit my sister got the best of me—that she had completed an unspeakable act I was sure she would never dare—I was filled with anger…anger that could only be redeemed with destruction. Joe would go down, a sacrifice to Mars, and I would blame it on my sister, pleading with my mother to punish her for the destruction of such a beloved gift.

Truth is, from the time I got Mego Joe Namath, I was puzzled. What the hell did I want this for? But it was a toy, right? A gift? Something I obviously was supposed to want. And given my unnatural attachment to objects, I had to keep it. It had to mean something more than I could quite fathom. It was as important as all material things, as all toys I longed for…right?

But I believe it was me who hit that handle, not only to get my sister in trouble, but because I was finally presented with a way to get rid of that weird, incomprehensible, whatever of a gift. The guilt of trying to flush him was roughly comparable to the guilt of not wanting him in the first place. Perpetually vexed by the tension between trying to accept and do what adults expected of me, and the desire to just melt down or blow up, I was a bit of a mess as a child…as I suspect all children are, in one way or another.

Feeling that you want what others think you shouldn’t, and that you don’t want what they think you should, is a hell of a thing.

So, Joe didn’t go, but he didn’t stay whole. And that became excuse enough for me to leave him behind…something incomplete I had an excuse to no longer play with. Back to teddy bears in dresses for me, with only a small lump of guilt for the subterfuge visited on Joe. And grandma, living several states away, never needed to know.

 

 

God Looks Away, Youth Minister Sex Offender Publishes Self-Serving Article (TW)

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At the core of “My Easy Trip from Youth Minister to Felon,” an article posted in the online version of Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal, is an odd and self-serving theological point: that God does not look upon sin, and that when sin continues long enough, God gives us over to it so that we might hit rock bottom and then seek redemption. God turning away is, according to the anonymous author, a convicted sex offender still in prison, the reason Jesus felt God had forsaken Him while He was on the cross—God could not look on His Son/Himself as His Son/He took on the sins of the world. It is God’s looking away, the author suggests, that allowed King David to embrace selfishness and send Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, into battle to die, so that David might have sexual access to Bathsheba. In this same fashion, the author contends, God looked away so that the author might plunge deep enough into sin to be made to answer for those sins.

The author provides no theological discussion of why God also looked away from the victim of the author’s sin, implying (through the author’s shaky theological discourse, and his frequent use of “we” and “our”) that the teenage girl who had been manipulated into a sexual relationship with her youth pastor, shared in the sin, or simply had to be sacrificed so that the author could be redeemed. Without ever naming his actual crime, the author crafts a tale of a sexual predator in need of redemption, and a sexual assault victim as sacrificial lamb, all with God’s blessing/God’s inability to stomach what was happening. But if we are to look at God as incapable of looking on sin, or even the victims of another person’s sinful behavior, then it seems only right to assume God looked away throughout the process that led to the publishing of the article.

The article, taken down from Leadership Journal after much public pressure, can be read from an alternate site here.

I’m a bit torn about whether I think people should read it—not in the sense that I think it deserved to ever be published in the first place—it didn’t—but because it provides an interesting look into the kinds of self-centered justifications, and victim-blaming that sex offenders will endorse in an effort to convince people around them that they’re sorry and won’t ever do anything like that again, because, boy, they’ve learned their lesson, and (in this case) Jesus forgave them, so you should, too.

What was meant by the editors to be taken as a moving story of sin and redemption was, instead, merely a continuation of the abuse, prettied up with self-aggrandizing mock-contrition and Bible verses. And, sadly, the editors saw fit to tag it with the “related topics” of Accountability, Character, Failure, Legal Issues, Self-examination, Sex, and Temptation. Of those tags, “Failure,” and “Legal Issues” seem the only appropriate ones. “Sex” only fits in the broadest definition; whereas “Sexual Assault” or “Sex Offenses” would have been much more fitting. “Temptation” is little more than a label that normalizes the sexualizing of underage girls.

It's not somebody who's seen the light...It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

It’s not somebody who’s seen the light…It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

What I keep wondering in all of this is how the article came to be posted in the first place. Did the editors of Leadership Journal coordinate with prison officials to approve the project, or did they just accept it from some inmate, insisting via e-mail that he had a unique tale of a fall from grace and a re-acquaintance with God? Did they know the author prior to his incarceration? Is the author in a treatment program in prison? If so, were his treatment providers at all aware of what he was doing? Were lawyers for the author, lawyers for the victim, or the judge in the case aware of the intent to publish such a piece? And, perhaps most importantly, was the victim, or the victim’s family aware that any of this was happening? And did she/they have any say in the matter?

I ask the above questions because I cannot imagine that, prior to publication, the article was examined by anybody with any clinical knowledge of offender behavior—or, for that matter, by anyone with any sense of the damage done to victims of sexual assaults. If I give the editors the benefit of the doubt, then maybe I can view them as possibly well-meaning, but definitely confused/ignorant people looking to generate an attention-grabbing conversation about statutory rape. And while, it certainly grabbed plenty of attention, that was because it took a story of sexual assault and transformed it into a discussion about how easy it is to be seduced by a teen when one takes one’s eyes off of God, and vice versa. The sexual content is so subdued/obscured that it comes across as if it is intended to describe temptation only—definitely much more so than if it was labeled appropriately as child molestation, pedophilia, hebephilia, exploitation of a minor, statutory rape, or rape.

Any sex offender treatment provider who knows anything at all about what she/he is doing certainly would never have approved of the article as it appeared. Offenders in treatment (in or out of prison) are often given writing assignments wherein they are required to relay details of their behaviors and thought processes and demonstrate an understanding of the damage they caused, as well as the way they convinced themselves it was okay. And while I recognize that it wasn’t specifically crafted as a treatment assignment, the Leadership Today piece reads like an eloquent first draft of such an assignment, crafted with care before a treatment provider and/or members of a treatment group demanded changes due to the author taking a victim stance, failing to acknowledge the actual crime or its impact on anyone other than himself, and refusing to incorporate even the most rudimentary sense of understanding about how he built up to the offense and kept it secret for as long as he did.

Or perhaps it’s more like a second draft, after the offender removed most of the overt blaming of the victim, and switched, instead, to implied mutual blame or implied consent for the crime.

I have heard hundreds of variations on the same basic story told in the article, from the mouths of offenders, emphasizing the frustrations in their lives, the reasons they had contact with the victim to begin with, and the reasons they are not to blame (and, yes, a lot of them invoke religion as part of that). It is rare to come in contact with an offender who, from the beginning (not of the offense, but of contact with the justice system and the need for an evaluation for sexual deviancy) is capable of outlining how he (or occasionally, she) manipulated the victim to engage in sexual acts and to keep it a secret, how he justified the crime to himself, and what specifically happened (in clinically appropriate and criminally accurate terms), without putting a large portion of the blame on the victim for somehow enticing or seducing him.

Despite the author’s claim, added after the controversy erupted, that he takes 100% of the blame for the crime, and recognizes that what he once viewed as a consensual relationship was no such thing, the article itself tells a much different story—of a man who worked hard to build something up for the glory of God (and how he was really amazing at doing that work), and then how he accidentally broke it because he was being selfish. Without ever acknowledging the severe harm he did to the victim, harm that is likely to last a lifetime, he signals that he has returned to a life of service to God because he is involved in leading a ministry group in prison (another thing I have a really hard time with anybody allowing).

And while the author touches on one of his justifications for engaging in his behavior—that his wife was paying too much attention to their children, and not enough to him—he is only able to acknowledge the impact on his wife in the form of the fight they had when she found out about the crimes, and how she left in the middle of the night with the children. The author laments that he has not seen his children since, but doesn’t even mention the extreme embarrassment and devastation he caused his wife and children. Nor does he ever fully indicate that he recognizes how childish his justifications for his behavior were, or how those justifications were merely the starting point for a cycle of lying and manipulation committed for the sole purpose of having repeated sexual contacts with a minor.

In a truly terrible minimization of his behavior, the author compares his repeated sexual abuse of the victim (while implying she shared in an identical struggle with him) to the difficulty of smokers trying to turn away from cigarettes.

From the complete dearth of information in the article, if this really were a treatment assignment, once all the extraneous details, self-promotion, and claims to deserved forgiveness are removed it might sound a little more like this:

“In my 30s, I accepted a position with a church as the coordinator of youth ministry. I built up the group from just a few members until it was one of the largest youth groups in the region. I realized I was experiencing sexual attraction to one of the underage members. I manipulated her into having sex with me, and justified my sex offenses, in part, by blaming my wife for not paying enough attention to me. I had sex with the teen repeatedly. When my wife found out, she took our children and left. I was convicted of sex offenses and sent to prison. I am currently still in prison. I will be a registered sex offender for the rest of my life.”

And, if the author began to actually include the most obvious missing items, the skeleton of a real assignment, or perhaps a combination of real assignments, would start to look like this:

“In my 30s, I accepted a position with a church as the coordinator of youth ministry. I built up the group from just a few members until it was one of the largest youth groups in the region. I realized I was experiencing sexual attraction to one of the underage members, and that she looked up to me in a way that made it possible for me to manipulate her. I set about grooming her. I justified my sex offenses, in part, by blaming my wife for not paying enough attention to me. I managed to work up to the point where I convinced the girl to have sex with me. I then had sex with her repeatedly while convincing myself that she wanted to have sex with me as well, that she was mature enough to handle a sexual relationship with an adult who is an authority figure in her spiritual life, and that I was in no way manipulating her. I managed to keep her from telling anybody about our relationship through various forms of coercion, and went to great lengths to keep anyone from finding out about it. We eventually got caught. My wife, understandably, left me and took the children with her. I was arrested and convicted of sex offenses. I am currently in prison. I will be a registered sex offender for the rest of my life. The teenager I manipulated and raped will need a great deal of therapy and other supports in order to cope with the aftermath of my actions. My wife, my children, and numerous other people impacted by my behavior will also need support to attempt to repair the damage I caused. I recognize that I need to stay away from minors for the rest of my life, and that I can never be placed in any kind of position where I might have authority that can be abused, particularly over any people who could be considered ‘vulnerable.’ I also manipulated editors of Leadership Today into publishing an article I wrote that completely justified my behavior, and suggested that the victim was equally to blame for my sex offenses.”

The assignment would be given back with numerous, specific requests for much more “self reflection,” “accountability,” and actual identification of his specific behaviors and thoughts.

Becoming a sex offender isn’t an “easy” path as the author’s title suggests. It is one that is pieced together with care by the offender, and crafted to secure the cooperation of the victim(s). It is not, as the author portrays it, a little trouble in a marriage, a dash of arrogance, and some innocent flirtations evolving over time into mutual passion—passion that makes God look away, as if God were easily embarrassed. Such a description may be a very simplistic explanation of how an extramarital affair (the words the author uses along with “adultery” to describe his sexually exploitative behavior of a child under his care) evolves.

Unfortunately, by diving into this discussion, without any sense of just how manipulative the author was, and how harmful his words are, the editors of Leadership Journal have put themselves in a place where they must now back away from this discussion entirely. Rather than promoting a meaningful dialog about forgiveness and redemption, they allowed a sex offender to promote himself as a victim of the temptation to have sex with minors.  They allowed him to promote his story of redemption—a story that rings as false as any rapist having the arrogance to compare himself to Christ on the cross, as he suggests that God’s mercy has saved him, all while implying a teenage girl entrusted to him for guidance and education was just as responsible for being raped as he was for raping her.

 

God Bless Anita Bryant

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Friday, May 16, I had my first experience with a mental health/chemical dependency conference hosted by a drag artist. The incomparable Aleksa Manila presided over the “Saying it Out Loud” conference, complete with multiple costume changes and delightfully tasteless jokes between various announcements, awards, introductions, and seminars. This was the thirteenth annual gathering of this conference, which was created with the goal “to continue to co-create learning, growth and understanding of the best practices and relevant clinical services needed to support members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning communities.”

Dr. Ronni Sanlo served as the keynote speaker, as well as screening a new documentary, “Letter to Anita,” about her almost-wasn’t involvement in LGBTQ activism. Now I’m going to get into a few spoilers here, but I don’t think the basics of Sanlo’s story are the heart of the documentary, as much as is the personal perspective she brings to them. So, when I say her activism “almost-wasn’t,” I mean that Sanlo, like a number of lesbian women of her generation, went about her life as a heterosexual woman, married (to a man) with whom she had two children, not really aware that there were other options.

Unfortunately, just as Sanlo was realizing that there were other options, that the attraction she felt to women wasn’t something that made her completely alone in the universe, Anita Bryant was ginning up Florida’s legislature to pass laws denying parental rights to gay parents. Sanlo’s divorce went through.  Her children, for all practical purposes, were taken away from her.

Liberty turns her back as Anita Bryant looks to the sky, expecting Jesus to fly down and smite the gays.

Liberty turns her back as Anita Bryant looks to the sky, expecting Jesus to fly down and smite the gays.

Hearing the story now, it seems unfathomable to me. In part, my disbelief comes because at the time Sanlo was being viewed as an unfit parent simply for acknowledging who she was, I was living a few doors away from a blended family—two lesbian mothers with three teenage children among them. Granted, at the time, I was in grade school and not really aware that the two parents in that household were ‘romantically linked.’ I was under the impression, for whatever reason, that the families were living together for other reasons—economic? ecological? I remember that, in the fifth or sixth grade, when our class was given an assignment to write an editorial letter about an issue of concern, I mentioned the family as I explained why we shouldn’t be mowing down forests and fields to build new houses when there were other options, including multi-family homes, that would allow greater preservation of nature. Clearly, I had missed the more important political/social issue facing the family.

At any rate, the nature of my neighbors’ relationship was eventually pointed out to me by gossiping peers, with the implication that I was stupid for not having realized it, along with the weird sexual goings-on that were certainly a part of that relationship. Not to say that I was super-forward-thinking at the time, but I knew the two women as my neighbors who had been pleasant to me whenever I encountered them. So whatever sexual things may have been going on between the two women were of about as much interest to me as those of the parents of anyone I knew. That is to say, I really didn’t devote much time at all to thinking about sexual things between various peoples’ parents, and may, as I tilted toward pubrerty and all manner of prurient thoughts, have actively avoided thinking about them.

As far as I was concerned back then, anyone who was cool and/or innocuous toward me warranted much less concern, anger, or fear than the bevy of teenage male piltdowners who seemed to have little more to do than roam the suburban streets trying to prove their masculinity by tormenting children much younger and smaller than them—a model of “manhood” I unfortunately subscribed to briefly when I hit a similar stage in life.

I can only imagine that the lives of the couple from the blended family had some parallels to Sanlo’s—at least in terms of them apparently having partnered with men to build families in order to live out the deliciously limiting American Dream. It’s not too big of a stretch to believe my neighbors, like Sanlo, had seen few other options for relationships but hetero marriage and procreation. It was my understanding that both of my neighbors were divorced, although, like same-sex partnerships, such things were not discussed a great deal at the time, despite divorce quickly becoming commonplace—something that would reach almost all of my friends who hadn’t, like me, experienced the death of a parent. And if the exes of my neighbors were still coming around to visit their teenage children, I wasn’t aware of it. Then again, I wasn’t aware of much that went on in the lives of those teens, since there was far too great of an age gap between us—that impossibly vast chasm between elementary school and high school—for us to concern ourselves with each other.

Speaking of parallels and gaps, “Letter to Anita” touches on another critical piece of Sanlo’s life that fits in with the development of my own understanding of individual rights, freedoms, and what it actually means to be something “other” than heterosexual: Anita Bryant’s crusade against, well, all people who don’t fit her very narrow definition of appropriate relationships (never you mind Bryant’s own divorce).

As I’ve noted before on my blog, I was raised religiously, in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. My father was a pastor in said church. My father died when I was rather young. I spent a great many years struggling with religious ideals and how they fit into the world. And despite my current agnostic tendencies, I still hold onto an idea of religion as an expanding element in peoples’ lives, a force that should open people up to larger experiences, a force that should create love and acceptance, as opposed to a limitation on peoples’ lives that causes anger, hatred, judgment, and closed-mindedness. I spent a lot of time struggling over moral issues, their relation to legal and spiritual concerns, and how we all get along as a people who are supposed to be dedicated to personal freedom, personal responsibility, community ties, love, and all the rest of that stuff.

But Anita Bryant, with her perfectly coiffed hair and starchily-pressed orange and brown polyester outfits, was telling me, in her own, orange-juice-endorsing way, to fear, hate and distrust people I knew, people who had shown me kindness, people I knew to be funny, smart, and no threat to me at all. She put out albums (which, as a teen, my younger brother delighted in purchasing from the local Goodwill for the purposes of mocking and destroying) filled with patriotic and religious songs, promoting the goodness of the USA and Jesus. Yet, everything she said, every objective she pursued, was in contrast to freedom, goodness, and the anti-judgmental stance that Jesus and America were supposed to represent.

Yes, Anita Bryant, in contrast to all she stood for, or wanted to stand for, had helped turn this white, hetero, suburban boy, and his white, hetero, suburban friends, into supporters of gay America…into people who would forever see the gay menace she was so sure was destroying us all, as nothing more than the paranoid delusion of close-minded, controlling, angry people who were completely incapable of seeing the irony of their anti-freedom, anti-love stance as they waved their flags and thumped their Bibles.  Anita Bryant, as Sanlo notes, managed to galvanize opposition to gay rights opposition–even out into the hetero world and parts of the Christian community she was so sure she could count on to share her views.

So God bless Anita Bryant. God bless Ronni Sanlo. And God bless us everyone.

The Coat: A Haute Couture Horror Story

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I wasn’t exactly a fashion-forward fourth grader.  Or perhaps my complete lack of fashion sense just meant I was incapable of comprehending what a style juggernaut I was.

At any rate, one would think that a nearly-knee-length, brown, corduroy coat, with enormous brown buttons and a matted-dog-fur-esque collar/lapel would have perfectly complimented my favorite pair of pants—off-white polyester with a thin woven black and orange-ish-yellow plaid.  But I wasn’t havin’ any of it.

I was used to my wardrobe being largely comprised of hand-me-downs.  And, for the most part, those came from my older brothers, so I’d had a preview of what I’d be wearing in upcoming years.  In most cases, I was looking forward to the day when those items would become mine–that funky navy/robin’s egg/and white macrame´ vest with the tassels, those polyester pants in sea-foam green with a padded micro-waffle texture…

But that coat.  That goddamned coat.  Childhood memories are, of course, often comprised of impressions and sensations, with a few points of actual fact.  As for the jacket, I think it came from a cousin.  I can’t be sure.  But I had been looking forward to taking possession of the multi-panel, blue, red, and white, ‘normal’ ski jacket my older brother had, at the same time I would pass my own multi-panel beige, white, and blue ski jacket onto my younger brother.

But by some cruel twist of fate, that brown, corduroy monstrosity had insinuated itself into the orderly transition of jackets.  It was an interloper.  It did not belong.  I lost my ski jacket to my younger brother, but took possession of that…thing.

Nobody wore a coat like that.  I mean, for fuck’s sake, people had metallic silver NASA jackets, and puffy, stuffed ski jackets in traffic-cone orange.  But a brown, corduroy jacket?  What the hell?  That thing wasn’t even waterproof.  And damned if I wanted to deal with something so stupid and girly as an umbrella to keep me dry (although I did have a really cool, clear, plastic, dome-style umbrella—oh, the sound of rain pounding down on that while pretending to be in a futuristic car or plane with a bubble dome over my own, personal pilot’s compartment.  ‘Fuck you, rain.  I’m from the future’).

Okay, I didn’t actually say “fuck you” to the rain or anybody/anything else when I was in the fourth grade.  But I did have my own arbitrary standards of what I would allow anybody to witness.  I walked to school every morning with my younger brother and older sister.  And, as with the umbrella, I would put the coat away on approaching the school, and, at the end of the school day, would avoid putting it on until a safe distance from the school grounds and any classmates that might see me.

To avoid the suspicion of my sister (or so I thought), as we approached the school, I would mention a few times how hot I was feeling in that bulky coat.  Now, by “put away” I meant I took the coat off and draped it over my arm, or rolled it into a tight bunch, hopefully making it inconspicuous enough that nobody would ask what it was or why I wasn’t wearing it until I could make it to the jacket hooks in my classroom.  There, I would abandon the damned thing, hanging it behind other coats already present, and pray nothing would happen that would lead anyone to look at it too closely.  My mom had, of course, written my name on the collar tag.  All anybody would have to do to see it was mine was flip it open a bit, right where it hung.

To minimize the possibility of anybody accidentally seeing it was my coat, I devised ways of folding the collar down between the hook and the tag, to keep the tag blocked from all but those who would actually go to the trouble of making the effort to move the collar and read the tag…as if that were a thing somebody would do.

I would leave the coat there, hanging.  Walking away from it, I would feel a small tinge of guilt at rejecting something that just wanted a chance to keep me warm—and not just rejecting it, but trying to hide its connection to me.

Mornings, before first bell, I would hang out in the classroom, often hovering by, or leaning against, the heater that ran along the length of the far wall.  I would pretend to study the calendar or the bulletin board that surrounded it, or look at the bulletin boards near the back wall where student classwork was posted, or even pull a book from the bookshelf and lean against the heater, reading, as if this was the kind of thing people did, warming myself from the chill that would set in during the few blocks I walked sans jacket.

If my best friend at the time, Doug, showed up early enough, we would inevitably draw—I don’t think I was in my souped-up van phase yet.  I was probably drawing monsters, while Doug worked at planes and other vehicles with an architect’s precision.  At any rate, I would make sure we moved the drawing activities as close to the heaters as possible.

Recesses were a bit trickier.  I spent them all in the library—first recess—about 15 minutes around 10:15 a.m.; lunch recess—whatever time was left after our noon lunch, which I took to eating rather slowly; and afternoon recess—15 minutes at 2:15 p.m.  There was some sort of ban on spending all of one’s recesses indoors—at least one recess had to be spent outside, to make sure we were getting fresh air and exercise.  Although, if you ask me, fresh air and exercise when it is 40 or fewer degrees outside is just about the last thing anybody needs—especially a skinny fourth-grader who refuses to wear his only coat.

So, in one of my earlier acts of rebellion and coercion, I convinced Doug to blow off the oppressive guidelines that said we had to go outside, and hang out in the library with me where we strategically re-positioned ourselves from recess to recess, playing chess, drawing, listening to old “Jack Benny Show” cassettes on bulky headphones, or, of course, reading.

This went on for several weeks before we were confronted about any of it.

But in the meantime, something else happened.  One morning, on the way to school, I realized I had left a homework assignment at home.  Now, the forgotten homework assignment did not occur to me until after I had gone through my ritual of claiming I was too hot to wear my coat, and had taken it off.  When the thought of the homework struck me, I thrust my coat at my sister, asking her to hold it, while I dug through my bag to confirm what I was already certain of…that I had left my homework papers on my desk at home.

I contemplated taking off with my book bag—after all, if I didn’t have it, what was I going to do with my homework once I retrieved it?  But it could only slow me down.  I checked my brown, Timex watch and calculated whether I could make it home and back in time for first bell, and weighed which was worse—arriving at school without my homework, or maybe arriving late.  I decided I should go for it.  Leaving my bag and coat with my sister, I took off, in a dead sprint all the way home through the suburban streets.

Despite my sense of self that says I was never athletic, I was fast—at least at short-distance running.  Soon, I arrived home, burst in through the front door, charged upstairs and flew across my bedroom to grab my homework.  Of course, this wasn’t the kind of thing that would have escaped my mother.  On my way back down and out, mom stopped me to ask if everything was okay.  I breathlessly told her I forgot my homework, but everything was fine—I could make it to school in time.  Not being one to not notice such things, my mother asked what happened with my coat.

I have no recollection of what I actually said, but in my built-up remembrance of the story, I said that I had made it to my classroom, took off my coat, realized I didn’t have my homework, and so ran home, not thinking about the coat, or anything other than that I needed to get my homework turned in.  I am convinced that I was a big enough nerd/worrier that my mother would have totally accepted this answer.

Perhaps at this point I would do well to lay out exactly what my real problem with the coat was.  Brown corduroy, fuzzy lapels, and giant buttons were only a part of the problem.  Certainly, they were a problem in the face of metallic silver and traffic-cone-orange fabrics.  Brown corduroy could not compete with that.  In fact, a brown corduroy coat was probably just as weird as metallic silver or puffy traffic-cone-orange pants would have been, while brown corduroy pants wouldn’t have drawn any attention at all.  But what was really problematic for me was that the coat reached nearly to my knees.  I thought it looked like an ugly dress.  I was afraid that I would be insulted for being girly.  By this time in my life, between my curly hair, penchant for school work and art, pronounced interest in stuffed animals, and general lack of interest in sports, I had been accused of being girly enough that I realized it was a ‘bad’ thing.  In fact, I had even mostly given up on engaging in one of my sister’s favorite pasttimes for me—putting on her emerald green costume dress and wandering through the living room when we had company.

So, I did my damnedest to try and plough through to the other side of winter without having to wear that damned coat anywhere that any of my classmates might see me, so they wouldn’t add it to the heap of things that suggested I was less-than-masculine.

On that particular occasion, I made it back to the school grounds, which were deserted…at least on the outside.  As I entered the far end of the field, I heard the “final” morning bell ring.  My heart sunk.  I was going to have to go through the humiliation of checking in at the main office.  And, I had left my book bag and coat with my sister.  I had the stupidest coat ever, and was probably going to have to go to my sister’s classroom to pick it up, where I would not only be forced to apologize profusely for interrupting class, but where I would probably be forced to put on the coat so my sister and her classmates could laugh at me before I returned to my own class, where my classmates could laugh at me, and decide right then and there that I was entirely too girly for anybody to ever be friends with me again.

Instead, I had the brilliant idea to go straight to my classroom and play dumb.  What?  I’m late?  Oh, well, here’s the homework assignment.  Gee, it’s cold in here.  Can I go sit on the heater while we copy our spelling words for the week?

My teacher, Ms. W, welcomed me to the classroom, and said nothing about me being late.  Being a teacher’s pet had its advantages.  She brought my book bag over to me, which my sister had thoughtfully dropped off at my classroom.  When I realized the implications of the presence of my book bag, I whipped my head around to check the coat rack.  There, out in front at one of the first spots, was my coat.  I was sure I could read my name on the tag from across the room, and was certain that my classmates had all seen it as well, and had probably already come up with some involved plan for recess wherein I would end up locked in the girls’ bathroom, or wandering the playground in that coat, as people fled from me like I was infected with the plague.

But, due to some sort of weird technicality, I was being set free.  My sister had dropped off my things and explained that I had gone back home to retrieve my homework.  That was good enough for Ms. W.  God, I loved/hated my sister.

Speaking of my sister, there was somewhere in all of this drama where she tried to convince me that the coat was totally acceptable—cool even.  How did she do that?  Peanuts, of course…  She tried to convince me that Snoopy was wearing the same basic coat by showing me a coloring book image with this version of Snoopy in a furry, brown coat.

Check it out...Snoopy's coat is almost as stupid as your's.

Check it out…Snoopy’s coat is almost as stupid as your’s.

I wanted to embrace this.  But it just wasn’t the same coat.  Snoopy was plainly wearing a fur coat that was part of an outfit showcasing his love of football.  And, for once, I didn’t give a fuck what Snoopy was doing.  Even if he had been wearing the exact same coat, it was stupid, and I hated it.  Snoopy should just go back to being naked, and I should get a normal jacket.

The real undoing in the whole coat drama involved my library scheme falling apart.  I can picture alternate versions of this scene…one with one of the librarians confronting me (and Doug), one with the other librarian doing the same, a third with both librarians doing the same, and a fourth with my teacher confronting me—although in that version, my imagination always inserts my sixth grade teacher, which makes no sense.

At any rate, the end result was that I had to go outside for at least one recess a day…which I was supposed to have been doing all along.

If I’m remembering correctly, I chose the lunchtime recess, because I could waste time in the cafeteria until the last person was done eating.  I even tried to sign up for lunch duty in the hopes of getting stuck wiping down tables instead of going outside.  But the cafeteria duty was assigned in a rotating pattern.  I couldn’t take over for anybody, no matter how much they would have been happy to have such a thing happen.  But even without cafeteria duty, after leaving the lunch room, I could waste time in the classroom, pretending to get ready to go out.

But eventually…I would have to go outside.  And I wasn’t going to put that coat on.

Doug and I had invented some sort of (now forgotten) game, based around the monkey bars, which we called “Planet of the Apes.”  So, of course, we called them the ape bars.  I tried to get back into that game, but I was freezing my face off.  I decided I couldn’t survive on the Planet of the Apes, and so ducked into an alcove in an outside wall where a drinking fountain had once been.  It wasn’t exactly comfortable or pleasant, and some of the piping that used to connect to the drinking fountain was still poking out of the back wall.  But it kept me out of the wind.  Doug initially tried to make a game of me being wedged into that alcove, standing in front of me, telling any passers by that there was nothing to see and to move along.  Of course, this attracted attention, at least briefly.  But like most of the things Doug and I did together, most people just ignored us.  It didn’t take Doug long to get bored of hanging out with somebody who was tucked into a hole in the wall.

In my mind, these recesses went on for weeks, in the same way that one’s mind can exaggerate any terrible experience.  Each time I was out on the playground, our playground aide, Ms. Volstack, would ask me about my jacket, doing her due dilligence, but would leave it alone when I said I had a coat but was doing just fine without it.  In reality, the coatless recesses probably lasted about three days…probably a total of 24 minutes outside.  Then Ms. Volstack was out for the day and our Principal, Mr. Scribner, filled in on recess duty.

It was also the day that one of the developmentally delayed kids decided to investigate my presence in the drinking fountain alcove.  My mind keeps inserting one of two particular people into the role of that kid, somebody who I didn’t know until the eighth grade, or a friend of mine from the year before, who had moved away, who was not DD.  Anyway, this kid was flitting about the playground, arms pulled up into his sleeves, flapping them around and making bird noises.

He had passed by the alcove a few times when he decided a bird attack was in order.  He had bird-attacked multiple other people that recess—which consisted of squawking loudly and swatting at the victim with his sleeves).  He augmented his usual bird attack by turning his back to me, and slamming into me.  With the piping coming out of the wall behind me, this became very unpleasant very fast–well, even more unpleasant than somebody slamming me into a concrete wall that didn’t have pipes sticking out of it.  And then Mr. Scribner came into view, checking to see why this kid had become interested in attacking the defunct drinking fountain alcove.

Mr. Scribner shooed the kid away and then began grilling me about just what I was doing wedged into the wall like I was, without a jacket.  I insisted, as I had with Ms. Volstack, that I had a coat, I just didn’t need it.  Mr. Scribner, though, was not as easily persuaded that all was fine.

See, my mom was a widow, or as one might call her these days, a single mother.  And not only a single mother, but one with five sons and one daughter.  Women, it was insisted at the time, could not raise sons adequately.  And given my exceptional oddness, I’m sure I did nothing to help disabuse people of such a notion.

Fortunately, the bird attack had not taken place until the last few minutes of lunch recess.  When the bell rang, despite Mr. Scribner standing there in front of me, I ducked to the side and bolted.  Like I said, I was fast.

I wasn’t party to whatever happened next.  I assume there was a phone call home.  I don’t remember my mother asking me anything about the coat…or I should say, I don’t recall ever being truthful about the coat when speaking to my mother.  I am sure I complained about it to her early on, in the way I most often complain, where there is no resolution except for the target of the complaining to go away forever.

My best guess is that my sister explained to my mother what I hated about that coat.  And I’m guessing my sister casually extracted that information from me while we were playing 45s in her bedroom.  Despite her history of getting me in trouble more than any other person on earth possibly could have, I was open with my sister unlike anybody else.  I can imagine that, while switching records between “Help Me Rhonda” and the “Theme from Rockford Files,” I said that the coat was so long it looked like a dress.  Bam.  Mystery solved.  Problem solved…sort of.

The next morning, when I got up, the coat was laid out at one end of the dining room table…along with a strip of about eight inches of fabric my mother had trimmed off the bottom of the coat.  She had sewn the bottom of the coat up, so it looked just like a shorter version of the same coat.

As with any of the times that I was confronted with the knowledge that somebody had learned of one of my bizarre schemes, I felt some deep-seated terror that I was in real troubl–that my mom had fixed the problem with the coat, and now I was gonna get it (not that I ever really “got it”—my mom is one of the most level-headed people I’ve ever met).  I stiffened up, and took my seat at the table to eat my breakfast…oatmeal and buttered toast.

At some point, my mother entered the dining room and said something along the lines of “I trimmed some of the extra fabric off your coat, so maybe it will fit better.”

I thanked her.  I wore the coat to school.  I took the big leap of wearing it all the way to class…and on recess, anticipating some fallout from wearing a jacket so ridiculously different from everybody else’s.

There was no fallout.

I suppose there’s some lesson to be learned about asking for help, voicing what you want so you can get the help you need…or at least explaining the specifics of what’s bothering you.  But still, even in its altered (and to my mind, less girly) state…I hated that fucking coat.