Redefining Realness (6 page)

The first time he said it, Chad looked at me all wide-eyed to see what I’d say. I said nothing, nodding to him that it was okay. He continued to play Mario Bros. with Derek, and soon we became desensitized to “The Fag One.” I took the name-calling with ease because 1) I was under the illusion that I deserved it because it was probably true; and 2) part of me felt guilty for not being a better big brother to Chad. He liked boy things, and I did not, but Derek and Rob did. They were the stand-in big brothers Chad deserved, the kind I couldn’t be. While the guys played games or watched sports, I’d sit in the room quietly, trying my best to go unnoticed.

At the time, Dad drove a city bus, the only job I remember him having. I beamed when he’d sit next to me at the kitchen table wearing his AC Transit uniform, mirroring the childhood photos I have of our family, which show Dad in his Navy fatigues and Chad and me with our diapers on; surely Mom was behind the camera. He looked like a man with a plan and purpose.

He brought that sense of order to the kitchen table every weekday afternoon, helping us with our homework, the first thing we were required to do when we got home from school. With an Oreo in my mouth, a pencil in my hand, and Dad serving as what I believed to be an all-knowing source to my second-grade assignments, I basked in the ease of our interactions. Homework became neutral territory for my father and me. We were allies there, in the same way that he and Chad seemed to be teammates.

“You always gotta be a step ahead,” he would say to me with a wink after explaining long division when my class was just learning basic division.

I believe Dad’s diligence with my homework was his means of
bonding with me, and his coaching took me beyond the classroom’s agenda, helping me excel in school while instilling a sense of structure and discipline and confidence. With Dad teaching me to do the work every day, I felt that nothing in a classroom could conquer or deter me except my talkative manner and undying need to be told I was exceptional.

When my teacher asked our class what we wanted to be when we grew up, my classmates chose respectable occupations. There were a dozen doctors, lawyers, and basketball players, countless cops and rappers, and a few firemen and teachers, but there was only one standout. “When I grow up, I want to be a secretary,” my sassy eight-year-old self proclaimed. I knew my peers were weary of me raising my hand with the right answer, even in this subjective challenge.

Despite liking the way the word
secretary
rolled off my tongue and the number of syllables it boasted, proving my intellectual prowess to my peers, I chose it as my grown-up job because I understood it to be a woman’s job. In nearly all the films or series I watched, I noticed that every man of importance had a secretary, an attractive, efficient keeper of his schedule.
That’s
so
me
, I thought, attracted to the elementary hyper-feminine, submissive depiction of womanhood—a sharp contrast to the masculine world where I lived with my father. In reflection, I roll my eyes at my youthful understanding of gender roles (the man in a position of power, the woman his servant), how limited my views were. Little did I know that I actually wanted to be Clair Huxtable. It’s a testament to how pervasive these images were—accessible to even a second-grader—and how these flawed and limited views of what was expected and encouraged of men and women shaped my understanding of what was possible. Thankfully, the idea of womanhood that I reached for in adolescence and adulthood was one that came from a place of internal power and accountability to one’s own dreams as opposed to aiding a man in the pursuit of his dreams.

“Does everyone know what a secretary is?” our teacher asked the class, holding a knowing glance in my direction as my peers shook their heads. “Charles, can you please explain to the class what a secretary does?”

“A secretary sits outside an important man’s office and takes care of things for him, like what time he needs to be at a meeting or the name of his new client, or types letters for him,” I said. “So if you’re going to be a doctor or lawyer, you’re going to need a secretary.”

“Very good,” she said. “Everybody give Charles a hand.”

As everyone applauded, I knew I was a hit. This was what made me love school: recognition. If you did well, if you excelled, then the system rewarded you, and I liked being rewarded.

That day I went home with a note for Dad. I jumped from my seat at the kitchen table when I heard him at the front door. When he came in wearing his blue uniform with his cap in hand, I handed him the note, which I was sure praised me. But Dad’s face curdled, as if Ms. Johnson’s note were sour. It was an exasperated look I had seen before. It mirrored Grandma Pearl’s expression after seeing me prancing around in that fuchsia muumuu a few years earlier.

“You want to be a secretary, is that right?” Dad said, tiredly unbuttoning the top of his starched shirt.

I knew from his tone that the right answer was no. I didn’t want to lie, so I remained silent as he lectured me not in long division or vocabulary but about what boys do in the world versus what girls do, how boys run and girls skip, how I was everything I shouldn’t be. My father’s rebukes were meant to be preventative, to stop whatever seed was growing inside of me. He looked at me quizzically, as if for the first time, because of a note from a stranger, what he had seen in me was now real. Someone else had seen it, it went beyond our own home, and he needed to stop it. I knew he wanted me to straighten my limp wrists and stiffen my hips as I walked, and lower the register
of my playground wailing. Self-consciousness and shame about being different blossomed, and I learned to be more careful, more practiced, more aware.

I’ve heard parents say all they want is “the best” for their children, but the best is subjective and anchored by how they know and learned the world. The expectations my father had of me had nothing to do with me and all to do with how he understood masculinity, what it meant to be a man, a strong black man. My father welcomed two sons into the world, and one was feminine and needed fixing. Using my childlike lens, I felt Dad was against me, consistently monitoring me and policing my gender. I’ve come to realize that he simply loved me and wanted to protect me, even from myself. He was grappling with fears that involved my safety and how my outward femininity would make me a target of bullying, teasing, and other dangers that he felt lay ahead. My adult understanding of my childhood with my father doesn’t erase the effects of his policing. I felt his gaze always following me, making me feel isolated as I quietly grappled with my identity. The loneliness and self-consciousness from these exchanges made me vulnerable in a way I wasn’t able to recognize until decades later. This recognition cast a new light on one pivotal evening with Derek.

I don’t remember where Dad went or why Chad wasn’t playing Super Mario Bros. on the carpet in front of the living room television. It was just the two of us: Derek lay back on the brown microsuede recliner, and I sprawled out on the matching couch. We sat in silence for about an hour, watching TV, before he interrupted the programming. “This is boring, huh?” he asked.

“I guess,” I said, watching him pull the lever on the chair to lift himself up.

“Let me show you something,” he said, grabbing my ankles. His touch felt foreign. I was irritated because I did not want to engage
in any kind of roughhousing. I had seen him wrestle with Chad, and they’d be on the ground in a human pretzel for what felt like an eternity before Chad would bow out.

He pulled me off the couch by my ankles and I said “Ouch” as my butt hit the carpet. I’d found that the more I complained about physical activity, the less energy I had to exert.

“Awww, did I hurt you?” he asked with a sweetness in his voice that mimicked a Jodeci song. “I didn’t mean to.”

Derek was rarely mean to me, but he wasn’t exactly sweet, either. My presence was tolerated, so to hear this tenderness in his voice threw me off, like the touch of his hands on my ankles.

“I’m okay,” I said, resting my weight on my knees, which dug into the carpet.

“Promise I’ll be gentle.” He smiled. “Let me show you a move. Get on my back and put your right arm around my neck.”

I did so and was quickly back on the ground. This time I didn’t complain. I relished Derek’s single-focused attention, and we jostled until he conquered me, lying over me while my belly and the side of my face touched the carpet. My legs were spread slightly, and I remember my feet meeting his knees. Peering back up at him with my left eye, I could see him smiling, and I was happy he was having fun with me. It was a first for us, a breakthrough in our relationship.

Then I felt him holding his breath; there was a stiffening, a tightness in his torso. He let my wrists free and placed all his weight on me. I felt his hips moving and a growth in what I simply called his “privates” at the time. His breathing grew heavier through his nose, and my thoughts raced faster than the beating of his heart on my back. I couldn’t see his face anymore. The TV screen flickered as he began digging his groin against my pajama-clad back.

Derek thrust faster and harder, and my cheek dug deep into the abrasive fibers of the carpet with each push. Derek didn’t pet or caress
me. He didn’t say a word. He just kept grinding as his breaths filled the silence around us. Then he jolted and stood up and walked away. I heard water splash against the ceramic sink in our parents’ bathroom.

I lay in that spot for minutes, not lifting my cheek from the carpet. I didn’t know what this was. I had no words then to describe the “moves” he had shown me. I was certain that they were to remain in the darkness of the living room and that I had asked for it because I didn’t play video games, because my wrists were perpetually limp, because his friend called me “The Fag One.”
This is what happens to sissies
, I thought.
If Dad finds out, you’re going to get whipped for acting like a girl again.

Unsure of Derek’s return, I peeled myself off the living room floor. In our bedroom, the sounds of Chad’s snoring and
I Love Lucy 
’s laugh track from the tiny TV on our dresser lulled me to sleep.

I
’m your boyfriend now, Nancy!” Freddy Krueger said, his tongue ramming through the receiver of Nancy’s phone.

I watched his slimy tongue attack Nancy’s earlobe with my mouth buried in my palm and my eyes peeking through the gaps between my fingers.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
reran often, especially on Halloween or Friday the thirteenth, and I was both enamored with and disgusted by Freddy’s antics. There was no scarier villain to me. Freddy stayed with me for years because he had a sense of humor, an actual charm that made me chuckle, even though he was a predator, a pedophile who took away a young person’s ability to dream.

The predator in my early life expertly blended good and bad qualities. Derek knew what attracted me and wielded that knowledge to target me. My inclinations made me all the more vulnerable to him, and my vulnerabilities made me easy prey.

Derek had me exactly where he wanted me the morning after our interaction on the carpet. As on all other mornings, I ate Cap’n Crunch in my plastic cereal bowl across the round kitchen table
from him. As on all other mornings, Derek ignored the sound of me slurping the sugary-sweet cereal milk. But our silence felt irregular. Derek, chewing on the two eggs he’d scrambled to top a piece of burnt toast, was no longer just my father’s girlfriend’s son. He was no longer a fifteen-year-old basketball player. He was no longer my kind-of brother, my live-in babysitter, the guy who sent us to our room when we complained about him not sharing the TV. He looked different than he had on all other mornings because he’d opened a door inside of me that could no longer just be shut.

Through the view from that opened door, I noticed how pointy his dark brown ears were and how the angles were symmetrical with his rectangular haircut. I noticed his thin plum lips, his protruding hazel eyes, features he shared with his mother, Janine. I noticed his long, thin fingers and the way they curved around the edges of his toast. I had seen his features before but never taken note of them because Derek held no significance to me. Now he was the manifestation of a secret I wasn’t equipped to keep.

Derek dragged me across a threshold out of childhood. Before he grabbed me by my ankles and opened that door, I had jumped double Dutch and played jacks and stolen packets of Nerds that jiggled in my pocket as I walked out of the corner store during beer runs for Dad. I had run away from scraggly stray dogs and rubbed my knees raw by riding my skateboard on one knee.

Now that door was cracked open, creaking on its hinges, and I didn’t know when or if I should walk through it. My world shifted when Derek wrestled with me on that carpet. It wasn’t the wrestling or the grinding; it was the foreplay that had me yearning for his return, that planted a craving in my belly. As I would later experience, Derek had petted me, held me, spoken softly to me, and I liked the attention, the closeness, and the intimacy. I liked the fact that this well-dressed teenager who had all the latest tapes and outfits liked
me. It was his attention, his wooing, that shifted my focus. And that was what I later learned that predators have in their arsenal of affections: They are able to make an isolated, outcast child feel special. Derek made me feel special when no one else was around, and especially when no one else validated the girl-child inside of me. Derek treated me like a girl, I thought, so I understood him to be my only ally, and my ally wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.

It took me years to recognize, label, and acknowledge Derek’s actions as molestation. I made excuses for him, from blaming my femininity to blaming his age. He was young, so he didn’t know any better, I often thought. But blaming myself and making excuses for Derek didn’t allow me to uncover the facts about child sexual abuse.

I later learned that the majority of sexual abuse offenses are committed by people who know the victim, including immediate or extended family members: a neighbor, coach, babysitter, teacher, or religious leader. According to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Crimes Against Children Research Center, over a third of all sexual abuse against children is committed by a minor. These statistics show a commonality between my experience and that of others who know and trust their abuser, who may be another young person. Though I now have empathy for Derek and am aware of his emotional immaturity, that doesn’t negate the pain his actions inflicted on me over those two years in my childhood.