A Sissy Boy Is Tested
Chapter Five: THE BICYCLE ON BELVEDERE ROAD
Our block of Belvedere Road in Jackson Mississippi in the summer of 1956 when I turned seven was a shimmering low rise of foot-burning faded asphalt with shoulders dipping into weedy grass swales interrupted by one car driveways. The post World War II modest single-story shuttered cottages at the end of each drive were covered in asbestos shingles in shades of pale blue, green, yellow, gray, and pervasive 1950’s white. Spring-loaded screened doors, dressed variously with dulled aluminum cutouts of preening cranes, beaming suns, and the occasional flamingo creaked and banged abruptly as tan barefoot children rushed in and out.
No one on our block had air conditioning. Instead, we made do with noisome hallway attic fan-created warm humid breezes, so that we were all drawn outside where we gathered in pools of shade under scrawny young pines or sprawling mimosas hung with dried brown seed pods that fluttered ever so slightly in the occasional stir of the heavy wet summer air.
My friend Billy lived down the hill at the corner of Belvedere Road and Cedarhurst Drive where my mother took the bus to work each weekday morning after my parents’ divorce, surely then a scandal that flew far above my juvenile radar.
Billy’s older sister, the strictly spectacular Jody, was the red hot center of my older brother George’s testosterone-driven adolescent universe.
I can still see him leaning toward her in his white T-shirt and black chinos with the trendy belted buckle across his narrow hips, while she, wearing a sleeveless white top and pink “short shorts,” glanced coyly up at him. While my friends and I played up and down the road, they just stood and stared at one another smiling and whispering all the while.
We did not yet understand what was happening there and thus failed to anticipate our own coming adolescent storms. No one then spoke of such things, let alone less common variations.
Bike riding was my passion. My friend Billy was a year older and our mutual friend Gilbert, a year younger. Billy, a younger male version of his sister Jody, led us and we followed. Gilbert, round and pudgy, owed his allegiance to the older more confident, and cocky Billy. And although we played and rode bikes together, most of my friends were the street’s girls. It just seemed to happen that way.
Before school recessed for the summer, I walked four blocks to Mary Lee Boyd Grammar School, and once nearly there, walked the rest of the way with my friend Vena who lived in a fashionable luxurious split level with a glowing aquarium in the front picture window. I remember her as my only school friend in first and second grade.
I also remember standing on the edge of the playground during recess watching all the boys running and playing as I wondered how to join in, yet knew I did not want to. What was all that rough and tumble about anyway? It looked like war. What was going on and why was I not part of it? Why did I not want to be?
Still, I knew I could not play with the girls at school because boys and girls each had separate play areas. Getting together was not allowed. So I just stood there alone on the edge of the playground and watched… hoping something might happen to end my misery and loneliness.
It did not.
After walking home from school I played hopscotch, jump rope, or coloring books with the girls on my block. During that summer after first grade, I remember sitting in a circle with them in the sun. For some inexplicable reason, I suddenly wanted to show off, so I ran home and took off my underwear so that when I returned and sat crossed-legged with them in my loose shorts on the grass, my tiny genitals could not be missed. No one, of course, said a word, which was a relief.
What was that about at seven? Somehow I wanted to be seen; to hide nothing. Yet I know I hide my alienation and developing sense of inadequacy quite well. Whatever the impetus, my sexual adventurism ended then and then for decades to come.
Another friend, Elizabeth, lived just across Cedarhurst Drive from Billy in a white house with a matching playhouse in the back yard which offered my favorite pastime of playing house. There were dusty hardwood floors to be swept and open window frames to talk through. As a child who had longingly coveted, pleaded for, and finally gotten his own set of plastic dishes, playing house in a real playhouse was something I understood and found endlessly entertaining and satisfying.
I also liked using the abundant supply of fallen pine straw in our next-door neighbor’s yard to create fuzzy outlines of imaginary houses, boats, and planes. When the girls and I tired of that, there was always coloring book time. Although they all seemed better at staying within the lines, my competitiveness spurred me to try to copy their techniques. So, as difficult and alienated as life at school seemed to be, my young life on Belvedere Road felt good.
Then came my seventh birthday. Daddy’s new pink and white Plymouth Belvedere sat in our driveway when he came to visit that day. I had long outgrown my small two-wheeler and wanted a bigger bicycle. So, on my birthday, a shiny new blue 24” Schwinn miraculously appeared from the Plymouth’s trunk.
Mama made my cake herself, but this time included a three-dimensional merry-go-round complete with little plastic horses mounted on red plastic straws that supported the candy-striped circus tent paper roof. My friends wore party hats and blew noisy paper whistles while we ate cake and ice cream. It was a perfect day on my perfect street. But then the party ended.
Some days later, I breezed down Belvedere Road to Billy’s house with my feet up on the Schwinn’s handlebars. I imagined I was flying and couldn’t have been happier when I streaked to a stop in his driveway where he and Gilbert were talking. I pushed down my chrome kickstand, got off, and joined in.
We jabbered amiably for a minute, but then Billy turned to me with suddenly hardened features and glaring blue eyes. He brushed past me and walked over to my bike to smartly swing one leg over to get on, and flatly announced in a challenging tone, “It’s my bike now.”
I tried to laugh this off as some joke, but I knew he was serious. Then I asked him nicely to give it back trying desperately not to whine in doing so. The truth was I was completely stunned and had no understanding at all of what was going on. Why was my friend suddenly not my friend, and why was he being so mean for no reason? Why was he humiliating me in front of Gilbert who stood still and mute offering no help or support? Why and how had Belvedere Road gone from paradise to hell in an instant?
My pleas for the bike’s return achieved nothing but Billy’s terse “I want it and you can’t make me give it back. Now get off of my driveway go home.” And I did …..because I could not think of what else to do. I knew somehow that I was supposed to push, shove, or hit Billy, but I had never done such a thing and had no instincts to help me.
My barely seven-year-old throat tightened into a tear-inducing knot as I turned away and hurried up the hill with my heart pounding. I cried all the way home, so stunned and hurt by this incomprehensible betrayal and the sudden meanness of the friend I so admired. I was overwhelmed and astonished by the senseless injustice, humiliation, and defeat of it all.
Once home, I tore open our back screen door still crying uncontrollably, hot, sweaty, and red with effort and emotion. My Gram, who had lived with us since the divorce, grabbed me by my wrists in the small overheated kitchen where she was cooking supper and shouted at me to calm down and stop crying. Meanwhile, the pressure cooker whistle howled and spit hissing steam to add to the bedlam.
In broken jagged sobs that made it near impossible to breathe, I stuttered out my tale of woe, catastrophe, injustice, and pure meanness believing that reassurance and help were soon to come. I was certain Gram would march angrily down the hill in her baggy worn-out house dress and battered old lady shoes to raise holy hell as she so often did with me. This time she would save me with the storm of invective and righteous indignation demanded by Billy’s vicious betrayal.
But that was not to be. Instead, she grabbed me, shook me hard, and shouted at me to stop all my blubbering. She narrowed her hard beady eyes and through grim tight lips told me to go down there and get my bike back myself. “I caint, I caint!” I whined. “He’ll never give it back. He’s older and bigger and he won’t ever!”
She thundered back “Stop being such a damn sissy. “I caint, I caint;” “that’s all I ever hear out of you and I won’t hear it anymore I tell you! Now go git your bike. Hit him if you have to!” with which she shoved me out of the kitchen door with nothing but the sound of my pounding blood in my ears.
I had no idea what to do. Verda Hicks, my Gram, the wielder of cutting green switches that regularly bloodied my thin little legs, was far more frightening and intimidating than Billy. Seeing no alternative, I began to meander slowly down our drive to the street.
From there, I could see Billy, Gilbert, and my bicycle where I had left them. I struggled to regain my self-control and to slow my breathing. I did my best to look resolute and determined, neither of which I felt, but both of which were essential to the task ahead. Then I walked down the street, up to Billy, looked him in the eye, and demanded “Give me my bike back!” And then….he did.
As suddenly as the nightmare had begun, it ended, almost like a rained-out summer thunderstorm. “I was just playin,” he said, though without any smile or even a friendly glint in his eye.
So, I got my bike back, but not my innocence, my dignity, or even my self-respect. Those were gone. I had failed an important test of boyhood by running home for help and had not even known I was being tested by Billy, Gilbert, and Gram too.
All I knew for sure was that Gram could not be counted on except to inflict pain, that boys could not be trusted, and that they were capable of meanness I could not remotely fathom.
Now, of course, I understand that with straight men and boys life is too often about dominance and submission; a constant struggle for the first and against the second. You can be predator or prey.
It is a lesson I still do not fully grasp other than to know it is true. Life is not sweet or easy and you might as well learn the lesson early. Sissies, in particular, need to learn it very well and must never forget it for even a moment. Those perceived to be weak become prey for predators. For many, predation is sport.
This has both embittered and emboldened me at different times in my life. But thanks to that hard as nails, mean old woman who was my Gram, and who always hated me for the sissy I was, I found my spine that day, even if a little late….. and I never lost it again. She taught me life’s most valuable lesson; that no one would take care of me but me, a lesson all the more essential for a sissy like me.
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