Here I am, going . . . Again
It's Not Polite To Spew When Your Mouth Is Full
The first time I wrote anything for publication I was threatened with suspension and death. It wasn’t a fascist state —- well, then again, yes, I guess it was: High School.
During the summer between sixth and seventh grade I was relocated from the home in which I’d always lived, back a country road, blessedly free of neighbors, to a small town hell in a house owned by the man my mother had married ten years after my father had drunk-driven into his third accident in which a climbing rung of a telephone pole pierced his brain. My mother’s new husband’s gray-asbestos-shingled, gold-shag carpeted, aqua-kitchen applianced, one-tub only-no shower-bathroomed dump stood on a street next to another identical dump, next to which were gradually less dump-y houses, all of which harbored small-minded people who would either hate me to varying degrees or, because they wanted to win the favor of my younger sister who’d radiated from birth whatever it is that guarantees popularity, would mostly ignore me.
In 1970s, small-town Maryland, “high school” included grades 7 through 12 in one building, matriculation to which was this rite of passage cum boot-camp, fraternity-initiation, hostage situation about which were told horror stories not unlike those classic-campfire tales about the ghosts of car accidents wandering the roads, and Freddie Kreugers and Jasons stalking teens who’d just had their first fuck so as to run them through with chainsaws . One’s only hope for survival was one’s peer group, the friends you’d made in elementary school. I’d never learned how to edit myself to a level of conformity that would earn me entry into any of the upper echelons of popularity, but, I had managed to attach myself to a coterie of other not-wholly pariah types, a safety-net I lost thanks to the man my mother married moving us to the house where wife number one had learned to hate him, much as my mother would come to do too, but too late to do her (or me) any good.
I don’t remember much about the four and a half years I spent in that high school before I dropped out; not because it was any more or less traumatic than 99% of everyone’s high school years, but, rather, because I agreed with everyone else: I didn’t belong there, I was alien, and so I never truly engaged in relationships or activities. I knew it was a temporary situation, like a prison sentence, and once I’d served it out, I could begin my real life.
However, my standardized test scores and grading history indicated I was gifted, to which end a sympathetic English teacher and reluctantly co-opted art teacher decided I would thrive being part of the school newspaper they had been tasked with putting together. The school mascot was a lion, and so they thought it clever to name the paper The Mane Line. I had suggested UpRoar, but that was pooh-poohed as unnecessarily provocative. You can see what I was up against.
It very quickly became clear that no one -— not the recruited students nor the faculty advisors -— had any real interest in or talent for journalism. I’m not sure some of them had ever even read a magazine or newspaper once they’d passed the age of Highlights and so I was de-facto editor, responsible for layout and design, and, finally, for running off and distributing the copies. It was the late 1970’s, a very different time, and no faculty member reviewed the finished product.
I had read magazines. I had read books. I was a devotee of Liz Smith and Rona Barrett; I knew what people wanted. I knew what sold. And it was a very small school, well under 750 students, and everyone knew everything about everyone else -— or, at least, thought they knew. There were rumors and legends and lies and secrets and scandals and I thought a column of blind items — which would actually be transparent to everyone — targeting the most popular students in a snarky, superior tone, would delight the majority of students, who — like me — did not belong to that group of IN.
I was wrong. Never underestimate the desire of those whose throats are being stepped on by the power-elite to sell out their co-torturees in a futile effort to gain foothold in a higher echelon.
Also, never underestimate the fear adults have of acknowledging that their children have sexual thoughts and energies and behaviors.
The Mane Line was shut down after one issue. On the day it was distributed it was confiscated before lunchtime. Along with the English and Art teachers who were listed as advisors, I was called to the office of the angry-old-white-man-old-school principal who was so red-faced with fury I thought he might explode; I was told that the only reason he wasn’t firing the teachers was because I’d sneakily printed copies before showing them the final product, and the only reason he wasn’t “beating my ass” was because he couldn’t legally do so anymore and that was what was wrong with this country, but he was pretty sure I’d get the beating I deserved by some of the people about whom I’d written and so, in hopes that would happen, he also wasn’t suspending me.
Here was the problem — or, so thought angry old white man.
Since they hadn’t let me name the paper UpRoar, I had included a gossip column with that heading. I wish I had a copy, but, alas, thanks to decades during which I survived floods and get-out-as-fast-as-you-can moves and get-out-or-I’ll-kill-you moves and get-out-or-I’ll-kill-myself moves and change-my-life purges of belongings and all the other ways in which we shed and slough off and get shut of and surrender the mountain of scree we accumulate simply by making our way through our days, the single edition of The ManeLine is long gone.
The cause of the school-wide apoplexy had to do with the scandal of my putting into print scuttlebutt and innuendo which was common knowledge, or, at least, shared anecdotal lore. It was along the lines of: Everyone’s least favorite cheerleader, while she might have her nose firmly in the air, is regularly lowering herself into the backseat of the hot rod of a hot bod no one would expect her to ride with. And: One of the BMOC’s turns out not to be quite so big after all.
I was fifteen. I’d been to sleep-away summer theatre camp and had explored with some vigor the kind of mansex I’d only read about in the porn mags a concerned lesbian-friend had given me, worried I’d not be ready to be ready when the opportunity to be ready presented itself. After summer camp full of much enthusiastic readiness, I was returned to the small-town high school where I was imprisoned; there was no gay sex to be had (that I knew about, then, but that’s another post) and so in the absence of adventures of my own, I was obsessed with the sexual shenanigans of those fortunate enough to be going at it.
I’m not great on remembering details, but I do recall with some clarity I had tried and failed to find a way to write about B.Y. having the hugest cock in the school. His arms were beautiful. Although it can’t have been the case, in my memory-bank he was the first person I knew with those prominent veins mixed in with the lean, sinewy and defined muscles of his arms. He had square pecs, and arm pits like perfect scoops, full of curly brown hair like the hair on his head, which grew just past his shoulders and which he was always pushing out of his face. I never saw his cock. But it was legend. He was known for hiking with the other in-crowd guys to a bridge over the Monocacy river, under which they would drink and smoke dope and swim, which activity B.Y. allegedly always did fully nude. I don’t doubt it was true: men with big dicks learn early on to use them in every possible setting, cock-size is collateral in this world, and it’s no secret that life is, all too often, a dick-wagging competition — and certainly, then, the late 70s in small-town rural America, before internet porn and sexting, a dick as big as B’s was an anomaly.
I’m sure I’ve been intimate with plenty of B.Y. sized and far larger dicks in the decades since, and I’m also sure, given the chance, I would have found a way to write about it in future editions of UpRoar in the ManeLine had I not been canceled.
And it wasn’t even really what I’d written that enraged angry-old-white-man principal — who, it occurs to me just as I type this, was probably younger then than I am now — but rather, that I, disinterested in sports and the opposite sex, clearly deserving of whatever bullying and bullshit to which I was daily subjected, someone who he clearly thought should be grateful just to be allowed to walk amongst the normal children since I was clearly not normal, but, rather very queer, pimpled, crooked-teethed, bad attitude, too smart for his own good piece of trash, had DARED to be my uppity self and challenge the elites in print, to dare to joke that what was being promoted as good and right and true and the American way was perhaps lousy and wrong and false and I wasn’t kneeling to pay obeisance to those who’d long presumed entitlement was theirs.
In time, indeed, I’d kneel to some of those same boys, and, truth, some of their fathers, and years later, some of their sons, but those genuflections were my choice and gave me power, that particular power that is bestowed upon cocksuckers who are unafraid to claim the title when they (we, I) are granting the magic of our talent for fellation to those angry-hungry-cis-het guys who can’t live out loud.
And there are people I know (and people I don’t) who will read this and say, like the principal who in his rabidly roiled apoplexy both shouted and shamedly hissed at me, “Why did you write about this kind of dirty thing?”
I’ll tell you why; because it’s the stories we are told not to tell, the things we are told not to say, the truths we all know but only whisper about, the words and acts and thoughts and feelings about which we are taught to feel shame, to fear, to shy away from, to deny, to run from, that are killing us. The same men who are getting their cocks sucked on the downlow are also trying to legislate against cocksuckers in general, along with trying to control women, people of color, people with lesser incomes, and, too, to tell us all what we should believe, who we should hate, to take away our rights to vote and to agency.
They want to tell us when we should be on our knees, when and what we should swallow, and they want us to do it all without making any noise, without asking anything in return, and without ever expecting them to own that they’ve forced us to our knees.
Not this cocksucker.
Not in this newly-fascist state we’re inching toward. For one thing, I’m not that young anymore and my knees can’t take it. And more important, essential even, it’s time that the voices that have been quieted, voices which the muzzle of shame has muted , voices that are being drowned out and lost in the cacophony of paranoia and hate being spewed by that cohort of cronies who golf and pretend-pray and forcibly hoard power and wealth and control, time that our voices are heard.
So I intend to speak.
But not, of course, when my mouth is full.