THE NAKED ANIMAL

further notes for an autobiographical strip search

In my handful of early memories, I feel unbearably perceptive, as if I were born with an old soul's supply of Weltschmerz. I must have appeared extremely astute to my mother as well, because she sent me to pre-school when I was only two and a half. I was big for my age, but I wasn’t nearly as verbally expressive as the four-year-olds who were my classmates. To make up for this deficit, I was hyperactive and sporadically violent. I am supposed to have started lots of playground scenes, one in which I bit a little girl on the cheek, leaving marks that she reportedly still has signs of today. I don’t remember being that aggressive. As far as I was concerned, I was a good little boy. Strange, maybe, but good. Like this:

Our task for the afternoon is to fingerpaint using various flavors of instant pudding, which we can tint with any combination of non-toxic food coloring. It is all easy to clean, and all edible. In fact, I surreptitiously take a few heaping fingerfuls in an impromptu taste test before deciding on my medium. I finally choose Pistachio for its pleasant softness and the cheerfulness of its particular green, which needs no tainting dye to enhance it. I take a whole bowl full and smear it across my newsprint painting pad on my miniature wooden easel. As I work, I pick up a gob and maneuver it downward in a zigzag or whip it into a spiral on the diagonal. Soon I disappear into the pistachio pudding, ski along its slopes, navigate its textural nuances. The teacher has to shake my shoulders firmly to break me from my spell when it is time for milk and cookies.

And then there’s this:

My mother had been asked by my nursery school teacher to come and pick me up because I had coerced a classmate of mine to touch the steaming wax paper envelope over which the teacher’s assistant had just run a hot iron in order to melt the crayon shavings contained within. This led to much crying and scolding, and apparently I was insubordinate as well as sadistic. When my mother pulled up in our 1967 olive green Chevrolet Estate station wagon, she yelled at me for acting like such a baby–I was expected to be very cognizant and adult at three years old for some reason. Not just a good boy, but a big good boy, mature for his age--or so they thought.

Now Kindergarten–that did feel grown up. I attended the after-lunch shift at a grade school about six blocks from our house, and I was allowed to walk there by myself. This was suburban Orange County, California, circa 1971. Could you imagine letting a five-year-old walk six blocks by himself anywhere these days? Sometimes I walked with the kid from across the street, Christine, who was from Alabama, and said "crowns" when she meant "crayons." You wanna play with my crowns? I envisioned a sort of beauty queen contest.

Most of the walk to school involved traversing a weedy field studded with electrical pylons. It ran about four blocks between my street and the street the school was on, flanked by fenced-in backyards. When I was alone, I shuffled slowly and stealthily through the field, catching glimpses through the spaces between pickets of people lounging by their pools or coddling their roses. I stopped and talked, for a long time, out loud, to the many curious cats who stalked the tall grasses at the field’s perimeter and, more gently, in low, conspiratorial tones, to the imperiously immovable ones who basked in the sun beneath the humming wires. I babbled with the lady bugs who napped intermittently on small leaves. I even talked to my shoes, assuring them they would soon be clean when I accidentally stepped in a mud puddle.

I was much less adept at talking to people, except for two little girls in my class. We would play restaurant together in the toy kitchen, with us as very egotistical and demanding chefs and the rest of the girls as our staff and customers. Meanwhile, the other boys would usually be playing something like cowboys and Indians or dodge ball. My teacher gave me lots of worried looks and finally, during recess one day, pulled me aside from my culinary imperatives and emphatically encouraged me to "get some fresh air" with the other boys (it was a kick ball day). I went outside and moped around the jungle gym until it was time for the teacher to read us into napland.

Some time in the summer after kindergarten, we made the trip up to Bakersfield, where I’d been born a few years earlier, and where we ended up staying for the rest of my childhood. There was some kind of party at my mom’s best friend’s house, meaning best friend from high school; maybe fourth of July–it was over a hundred and the pool was a big feature. There were about twenty people there, I"d say, eight of them children, five boys and three girls. I evened the balance by joining the girls in a Barbie fashion extravaganza–cooled almost to cold by the white noise and frosty breath of central air, while the boys played some sort of aggressive ball game in the pool.

This was well into the party. We’d already played Marco Polo and practiced our dives, eaten cheeseburgers and chili dogs from the barbecue, got in the pool right afterwards despite our parents’ boozy warnings to wait half an hour; and marveled at the new pet turtle that slowly stalked the square of lawn beside the pool while the adults downed copious liquor, lounging on the swanky new patio furniture.

By the time I was ensconced in one of the girls’ bedrooms, free of sweat and brashly pairing a magenta jacket with an orange miniskirt on my Malibu model, the adults were good and sloshed, and I knew that my dad was the most bombed of all. I could hear his loud laugh through the tightly-sealed skin of the house, desperate and adrenaline-fueled. Some sort of ruckus started up, and wouldn’t you know it, it was all about me.

Now I could hear their voices clearly. Why wasn’t I out there playing with the boys, who by that time had switched to a dive bomb contest? Where the hell was I? Seconds later, the door to Jane or Jennifer’s bedroom slams open, and my dad is there, screaming at the top of his lungs that it was disgusting that I was in there playing with dolls, or words to that effect. Boys don’t do that. His face was red and laced with strained veins as he yanked me up off the floor, toppling over one of Barbie’s dressing cases in the process, and forced me outside.

I did one big dive bomb just to please my irate father while everyone else in the whole place sat still and stony with dumbstruck grins on their faces. I tried to splash my dad, who was standing at the side of the pool encouraging me with undue enthusiasm, but I only got his bare feet wet. Most of my not dismissible splash watered the oleander hedges on the other side of the pool. I got right out, wrapped a towel around me and followed the creeping turtle around, pretending to be unwaveringly fascinated. This seemed to mollify my dad just as much as the bomb dive, so I kept it up until the party started disintegrating. I became one with that turtle, nothing on my mind but the snugness of my shell and the sureness of my exruciatingly slow progression, even if it was around in circles.

This became the dominant theme of my childhood. My parents were constantly worrying about and discussing my proclivity for playing with the girls instead of the boys and what to do about it. My father tried to teach me to fight ... once only, due to my complete unwillingness and lack of natural pugilistic talent. My mother called my little friends’ mothers to make sure I was really over at Jack or Jimmy’s house like I said I would be instead of at Ann-Marie’s. I soon realized that not only my parents, but everyone else’s parents, and my teachers--and just about everyone else in the world, it seemed--worried about and disccused my gender confusion with great concern. It became the hot topic, shadowing any other problems that may have been brewing--and there were many.

Categories: backstory, bakersfield, glbt