Back from the Playground
A personal essay for my poem “On the Playground” about bullying
An excerpt…
Jason pulled back on that word
And threw it at Jennifer
Knocking out her self control.
She caught it on the lip which was quivering
Then she was gone.
Back then they said I was teased. I was teased until I was a frayed knot. Afraid not to fit in; afraid to be seen; afraid. Anxiety-ridden.
But this isn't just my story of being from “slutland” or being a “big nosed freak.” Even my mother recognized I had a prominent nose and a butt chin at age thirteen, and at that age I couldn't quite carry them.
My friends and I, we were the Three Musketeers, fighting with our wits and with our mouths mostly. We accidentally got physical here and there.
For the particulars on the poem “On the Playground,” that’s the context you need. I was an athlete. But an out of school one. I did gymnastics (more on this in my memoir passage “Hard Hearing”) which meant I couldn’t do in-school sports. By grade 8, I had been getting death threats for two summers ever since I dated the wrong guy from out of town, the equivalent to the wrong side of the tracks. He was from the “city.”
The worst part of this was seeing my friends experience the same thing or worse happening to them. One was more like me, more reserved, less chatty than Chatty Cathy. Chatty Cathy got along. Chatty Cathy joined the clubs. She had other friends. Me and Annie—we had each other and that was it.
On one particular occasion featured in the poem, I was walking on the parallel bar and slipped landing with the bar smack between my legs. I tumbled to the ground and couldn’t stand or catch my breath for several minutes. By the time I did, my pants were wet and bloody. Instead of getting help, kids gathered around taunting me for “popping my cherry” and pissing my pants. I was mortified and in pain. I also didn’t know what they were all laughing about. Once more, I was the odd-ball out.
Three or four boys led the taunting. They were the athletes, the second tier kids. The ones not picked first in dodgeball, but who could get along in second string rounds. I was usually picked second or third from the last. I was athletic and fit, but passive. I eventually grew into my features and ended up looking pretty normal but the fear remained for years to come.
I don’t know what caused the sexualization of my small town, but it certainly had some of the grittiest terminology around sex that I’ve ever heard even as a teen on the “therapeutic school circuit” or now as an adult. The kids said all the things I included in the poem and some more colorful language I omitted, all before moving up to the high school. We were middle schoolers swinging the worst insults we could come up with, not all of them making sense.
We flung curse words
The way we did frisbees and baseballs
There were fights, and clotheslines, contusions, and concussions all in the year before grade nine.
One girl kicked a boy so hard towards his groin that his hand was broken when he blocked the blow. Another girl punched a boy, bloodying his mouth when he snapped her bra in the coat closet. There were rankings of hotness and who was most prude. There were black eyes and permanently bruised spirits over those lists. Some never recovered themselves.
Kids are tormented by unwanted touch, by being “teased,” by being singled out from the crowd for qualities deemed somehow derelict. One of the most harassed did become a drug addict, so did several of the boys doing the harassing.
The names in the poem are aliases. The names changed to protect the guilty, and they were guilty of what today would be called bullying. The characters are an amalgamation of people boiled down to a composite, a way of painting a clear picture in such a small space as this poem. There’s a lot packed in there. All of it real. Real tragic.
I got out of that school, out of town, out of the way of this toxicity, but I felt the tale should be told because this bullying, to this level of vulgarity and beyond, is happening in our schools, over the phone, on the internet, and the victims and aggressors need to be addressed. Guidance is needed in ways my school was not equipped for when these girls and I were faced with this brutal “teasing” that left us like frayed knots.
