The Mighty Franks: A Memoir. Michael Frank

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      Suzie. Sissy. Faggot. Latent homosexual (that one I had to look up). Was I what they said, what they called me? What was I? All I knew was that I wasn’t a boy the way they were boys. I certainly wasn’t a girl. And I didn’t feel an attraction to anyone at that age. I had only one matter on my mind, one goal: to make it through the school day without these thugs or their minions (and they had them, many of them) going after me.

      I honed my approach over the years. After the incident behind the ball shed, I kept myself covered up. I buckled my belt so tightly that the clasp (brass, two-pronged) bit into my flesh, leaving indentations that were visible in a certain light for days afterward. I wore layers of T-shirts, short sleeve over long sleeve, though sometimes the other way around, to help insulate my body, even on seventy-, eighty-degree days. Of course I kept my distance, sitting off in a corner of the school yard bent over my reading or my sketching, as inward-turning and balled-up as it was possible for a tall, gangly, vigilant boy to be.

      My technique didn’t always work. Well into middle school there was scarcely a season, outside of summer, when my body was without bruises in different evolving shades: blue-black, purple-blue, greenish-yellow, yellowish-beige.

      My self—my inner self—was a different matter. From Alfred, my experience of Alfred, I trained myself to go dead. I went through a kind of ritual every morning as soon as I stepped out our front door. It lasted for the amount of time it took me to walk from our house to the bus stop. I began with my feet and worked my way up my entire body, stiffening and hardening it from within. Going dead inside in this way, deep inside, made me strong, impermeable. A warrior. That was how I thought of it: I was a warrior who every day went to do battle at Wonderland Avenue Elementary and later Bancroft Junior High. To be a target while other people did battle, though, was more accurate.

       You don’t want to be ordinary, do you, Lovey? To fit in? Fitting in is a form of living death. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always.

      I always did.

      Alfred was a dead ringer for Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad magazine mascot that was Danny’s preferred reading material in these years. He even had his freckles, a version of his unorthodontured teeth, and a similar if slightly less exaggerated dead, mal-shaped left eye.

      His modus operandi was to lie in wait, coiled and cobra-like, in all the interstitial spaces in the day where bullies tend to thrive. At the bus stop in the morning and again in the afternoon. On the playground at recess. Or at lunch hour, where he was often assisted in his machinations by his greasy, rotund sidekick, Jared.

      But Alfred’s deepest, strangest power was his Janus-like changeability. At school he was a combination of demon and ringmaster. On the bus ride he liked to finish off the day’s work by digging his nails into the backs of my hands, gouging out tiny crescent-shaped bits of flesh into which a few drops of blood would rise up afterward. Yet as soon as the bus pulled away and the other neighborhood kids scattered, often, as often as not, he would turn to me and say, “So do you want to come over and play?” Or trade baseball cards (an early shared interest)? Or stamps (a later one)?

      Absurdly to me now, I would answer, “Sure.” I would go home and change out of my school clothes, pick up my handball or my trading cards or my stamp collection, and I would cross the street to his house, or else he would cross the street СКАЧАТЬ