Orange Peels

Orange Peels

It is Iowa in 1966. A lot of things are happening in the world but I am focused on one thing, surviving gym. I know I can survive it physically, a certain amount of the humiliation I can take. I am fourteen, have acne, and have learned to make friends by being witty. I have suffered under the shadow of my father who plays baseball, knows a lot about cattle and crops, and is the local Lutheran minister. We are not from town like everyone else. Or we live in town and everyone else lives in the country. It is still possible to have a family farm in 1966. But we are outsiders. My mother is from Detroit and becomes friends with some of the younger women, but she cannot really get the hang of being the pastor’s wife. I live in my own world until about fourteen, which has meant that I have not been a very good student. My own world goes on when I am sitting in class. I find it hard to make school seem real compared to the movies on television and my fantasies that explain why I am loner. At times my explanation was that I was a space alien whose world has been painstakingly reproduced here and everyone is watching me. I am the specimen. Others were less futuristic and traditional, hybridding off from the Brontes and Dickens and all of those fairytales of lost children.
But when I reach fourteen things are looking up. I stay overnight with Randy Jensen and Alan Hansen. I go to parties, which my father in an earlier more pietistic incarnation would have banned me from going to. There is just the gym that ruins my life and not the gym class itself, though boys from the eighth grade, my older sister’s class, often hit me in passing or in football slam me in the nuts so that next time I will leave a hole for them to run through. I have forgotten the names of many of them, but they still appear in my dreams and in my dreams I remember their names. .As I said, it is not the class, but the showers afterwards where I am forced to rub lineament on my testicles and penis and am punched randomly. There is nothing sexual, I guess. It is just humiliation, which eats at my soul and lasts the rest of the day. I cannot even escape into that old other world because I reek of lineament. Although I feel that these boys have seen something inherently wrong with me, but later I will realize that it is the feeling of power and the system is set up and encourages them to prey on the weaker. I know the gym instructor knows from some comments he has made.
I have gym on Tuesday and Thursday so Monday I begin to worry about it and on Tuesday I can think of nothing else or if I do I have to trap those fears, hold them back and it is exhausting keeping them at bay. Tuesday after gym, I begin worrying about Thursday. Friday and Saturday I can shut it out, but by Sunday night, it gets worse.
Then it begins to invade other parts of my world. During lunch hour I am walking in the hall by myself and three of them surround me and push me to an empty side hall that is the entrance to the music room.
Tom Potts drops a large piece of orange peel on the linoleum floor and steps on it. “Pick it up and eat it.”
I hesitate for a moment and am punched.
I pick it up and put it in my mouth and chew slowly.
“Swallow,” Stewart says. Then he grabs the back of my neck hard and I swallow.
Then they turn and walk away.
In the fall, I am mowing a lawn near the school and the athletes are there for some reason. Some boys from my sister’s class walk over and surround me. They grab the mower and shut it off and then turn it over. I don’t react. This is not logical. It will be over eventually. I have learned to cut off chunks of my life from what I think is real and then let them float as if they were icebergs. When that time is up and my life looks bearable again, then I will reassume my body. I do not enter the other world that I had as a child. That is a stranger whose head hits the shower stall wall. That is someone else living with so much fear that everything else is a blur.
A few years after we moved to Iowa, I became a paperboy and perhaps this was how I developed the idea that Iowa was the best place in the world to live. Local newspapers are the voice of boosterism, the text of provincialism as the only way. The world of those old movies, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London did not seem real, but Iowa was real and wonderful. And of course, the small town where I lived was also the best. All of these assertions needed occasional support. Enough trickled in. Our basketball team won a tournament for small-town teams. A pitcher on the high school team was scouted by a professional team. A flood put the town where we went to shop on the map for a week. A kid in my sister’s class did 1,200 situps at one time. Iowa had the richest soil in the world. The Rothschilds bought farm property in Iowa. I had no doubt that I lived in the best place in the world.
I also saw that the school authorities in a sense condoned it. If someone had been killed or committed suicide, they would have denied any knowledge. Nowadays it seems like the bullying still happens and occasionally the bullied flip out, get a gun and look for revenge indiscriminately. But I knew the coach was aware of what was going on. He never came in when things were happening.
Then at fifteen, I saw my real life waiting for me as soon as I could leave Iowa. The reason I wanted to leave was to escape the hazing. I wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t happen some place else. When my parents told me that we were moving to Wisconsin, I don’t think I felt at all sad. From age six to fifteen I had lived in the same house, walked to the same schools, seen the same people on Sunday.
It proved in many ways to be true. I left to a bigger town with a bigger high school where I could be more anonymous as a kid and more outstanding as a student. And gym was not a harrowing experience. A friend of mine even came out of the showers screeching, “I am the water fairy.” I didn’t get the joke. Perhaps a lot of others didn’t get it either.
I wish I could say that this experience made me a more understanding boy, but that is not true. I actually remember trying to bully someone myself. He was a much better person than I was. His name was Arlo Petersen and his father had died in a silo accident the year before so he had stayed back for a year. I remember we were in the entrance to the school. I don’t remember what I tried to make Arlo do, but he resisted and after he had won, he wanted no hard feelings. I mumbled an agreement to the pact, understanding suddenly what I had tried to do. I wish my memory was good enough to set the scene better. Whenever I have an attack of righteousness, I am again humbled when I remember Arlo.
One of my heroes was Dean Jacobsen. He was only a year older than I was and I saw him when I went to take piano lessons at his grandmother’s house. Sometimes he drove tractor as the men did the heavy work. He was only 8 or 9 at the time. His grandmother played the piano in church and I doubt if she had any method other than the piano lesson books she bought. I never got beyond playing by numbers. She gave lessons in her parlor which was heated by a corn cob stove. She dressed in wool pants with a skirt over them and a jacket. She wore gloves with the fingers cut out. I suppose I kept my coat on when I played. She never smiled or gave any words of encouragement that I remember. I remember her hunched over on the bench next to me to keep warm and her periodically tossing corncobs into the stove while I tried to synchronize numbers, fingers and keys.
I took piano lessons from Mamie for only six months at most. I remember Dean on the tractor in the spring when the embers in the pot bellied stove and the open parlor windows that let in the April sunlight was enough to warm the parlor so there were no interruptions to cast a cob into the mouth of the stove. I had learned to play a few other pieces as badly as the first ones. I don’t remember why I stopped going to Mamie. There were several other teachers after her, all with miserable results.
I came out of her house. My mother was waiting and pointed out Dean to me on the tractor. He waved to me. I don’t think I had a crush on him, but I felt proud that he had waved and I thought he was beautiful. His arms and torso were already brown from the spring sun. I kept this feeling of admiration for him. He was not one of the boys that hazed me, at least not until one day when he hit me and made me crawl on the floor in the locker room. My memory again fails. I have told this to no one. I can’t really recall anything other than the feeling that the world was no totally bad. That he had not stopped them, I understood, but now he had become one of them. Real disappointment is not a moment for tears. Everything pulls in, including tears. The air seems locked in your lungs. Your body becomes heavy and your tongue disappears down your throat.
I was probably not the most harassed kid. The sheriff’s son was feminine and girlish. He walked to school and his father followed in the car. They might call him names, but they did not get out to rough him up. To me it seemed as if he travelled in a protective bubble that separated him even more from the world. Out of curiosity, I would like to know what happened to him.
You learn to cope with everything. Your whole life might be changed by one of these people when the age of being cornered in a hallway and silenced by the fear of being known as the sissy is over. Then people have power over your job and can silence you as they please, even in a university which preaches free expression.
So what do I know about bullies. One thing is that whatever they say is true. It doesn’t matter how absurd, how demeaning to one it might be. They are often people who have suffered because of a lack of power and once they get power over someone, they see it as their turn, their right, and any act can be justified. I would not categorize Dean as a bully, even though that one time he acted as one. A bully needs constant reinforcement by demeaning someone else. They love the sense of power. In academic situations they get power by kissing ass, not necessarily by performance or by excelling. And as ass kissers need a sense of dignity as much as anyone else, so they necessarily force others to become their sycophants. It can be totally demoralizing to a department and those who are not protected by tenure are easy victims. If a professor refuses to play along, they are singled out. Their evaluations become worse. It seems to happen one by one, but the numbers pile up.