me. They kept on punching and kicking. I remember falling
and saliva pouring from my mouth and screaming. They kept
punching me in the stomach until I fell all the way to the
ground then they kicked me in the stomach over and over and
then they ran away. I lay on the ground quite a while. No one
offered to help me up. Everyone just stared at me. I got up but
I couldn’t get all the way up because I couldn’t straighten my
stomach, it hurt too much. I held it with both hands and stood
bent-backed. No one touched me or helped me or spoke to
me. I must have said something like my daddy told me it’s not
right to steal. Then someone said that she knew someone who
said my daddy was a sissy. A what? A sissy. He’s a sissy. What
does that mean, I must have asked. You know, she said, that’s
2
what all the boys say, that he’s a sissy. Enraged, I walked
doubled up home, determined to find the girls who had beat
me up. But my parents told me not to because they would just
hurt me more. I wanted to go into every junior high school
class and look for them. But it would just make trouble and
they would hurt me more, I was told. I remembered
remembered my girlfriends doing nothing. They were somehow
worse than awful and mean. Doing nothing was worse.
*
When you get beat up you don’t see much, you begin falling,
you begin trying not to fall so you feel yourself falling and you
feel yourself trying to stay straight and the fists come from
every direction, down on your head and in your face and in
your gut most, and you keep not falling until you can’t breathe
anymore and then you fall. You hit the cement and you feel it
hit you and you see the feet coming at you and you keep trying
to protect your face especially and your eyes and your teeth
and if you can move once you’re down you try to kick back,
to use your legs to get them off of you, but if you fall so that
your legs are sort of twisted under you then you can’t do that
and you can feel your back twist away from your stomach and
it’s real hard not to piss and once they’ve stopped it’s real hard
not to vomit. You don’t know anything about other people
except the ones hitting you if there are a mess of them and
they are all punching you at once. You don’t think, oh, my
friends are standing around watching. It’s after, when you are
suddenly alone, when the heat of the hitting bodies is suddenly
cold air on your sweat and you suddenly understand that you
are not being punched anymore, it has stopped, and you are
not being kicked anymore, it has stopped, and you think, oh,
I’m not dead, I can breathe, now let’s see if I can move, and
you try to stand up no matter what it costs because standing is
the best thing, it gives you something back, and it is in the
process of trying to get up that you look around and see your
