Bury Your Bullies

It’s hard to believe, I’m sure, but I was bullied a lot as a kid. And not always for being gay, although that definitely became the go-to reason by the time I entered middle school. Queer! and Faggot! replaced the word sissy and suddenly people wanted to beat me up.

Bullying has never made sense to me, and trust me—I’ve thought about it a lot. Like, if I don’t like someone or something, I just avoid it. On purpose. For example, I don’t like chocolate. (And don’t fucking message me to demand I explain myself. I fucking hate it. Period.) So I avoid chocolate. Not bullies. They declare their hatred of you, then make it their mission to seek you out at every opportunity. And, yes, I know that tormenting people gives a bully some perverse thrill. I know that. I get it. But wouldn’t a hobby or something be more fun? I’d suggest reading a book, but most bullies I have dealt with in my life could barely form their own sentences, much less read and understand someone else’s.

The first time I remember being bullied was in the fourth grade, and it wasn’t because I was gay. It was because I was poor. It confused me because we didn’t live in an affluent city, so all the kids at my school were poor. But leave it to a bunch of poor kids to put their heads together and decide there were fucking levels of poor, I guess. Apparently, we were on the bottom.

My fourth-grade bully ended up in rehab after high school and ultimately died of an overdose. And the only reason I remember this at all is because I remember clearly the time I ran into a girl from fourth grade who asked if I’d heard about N___ O___. Of course I hadn’t. I’d graduated high school and moved out of state the next day for college because I didn’t want to ever hear about N___ O___ again. “No,” I told her.

“He died!” she said, in a whisper for some reason. Like he might overhear her.

“Oh,” I said, with as little emotion as possible. Not because I didn’t care. I cared very much. I just didn’t want her to know how glad I was to get the news. I remember wishing I’d killed him. If not that, then I wished I’d been there to see him die.

I can’t explain why the bullying I received from N___ affected me so much. Maybe because it was the first real bullying I’d ever experienced and it left some deep emotional scar. And I’ve grown beyond the need to kill him or watch him die, so… growth. But back then, in my early 20s, the scars were still fresh. I can still see the look on her face when I didn’t express surprise or empathy at the news of his death, though. She really had expected me to be torn up about the loss.

In middle school, my bullies were all older boys. They hated me because I was gay. Like it impacted their own lives in some way only they knew but could never adequately explain. What I noticed in middle school, though, is how girls were passive participants in the bullying, where they hadn’t been in elementary school. Back then, they would stand up to bullies, their voices shrill and their hands on their hips. They would report bullies to teachers, the principal. Not in middle school, though. They’d hear the word fag and roll their eyes. “Ignore them,” they advised me. (I already was.) But when I said I was ignoring them, that’s what I meant. Those girls told me to ignore the older boys, then they’d go to the dance with them or hold hands with them as they walked from school.

Pretty people have always gotten a pass for bullying. I know that. These guys weren’t attractive, they were just older, and that was an aphrodisiac of sorts for girls just entering puberty. One guy left middle school and went to high school and got engaged to a girl I knew. She was bragging about it and showing off the ring he’d given her. I remember thinking the ring was ugly and he’d probably bought it at Wal-Mart.

Anyway, the next thing I know, a girl in my class told me she was dating him. We were in the seventh grade and he was in high school, three years older than we were. I didn’t point that out to her, but I did tell her I thought he was engaged. She was aghast. Evidently, she had no idea he’d been engaged to someone and he hadn’t told her. I didn’t think anything about it until he and a bunch of his friends started following the school bus when it took me home and dropped me off. The car would idle there on the street as I checked the mail. He’d roll the passenger window down and glare at me, then the car would peel away. It was scary the first few times. My parents weren’t home then and a carload of rabid high school boys could easily have killed me or put me in the hospital. Eventually, I figured out he was all hat and no cattle, so I just pretended they weren’t even there. I stepped off the bus, checked the mailbox, and walked up our driveway without even a glance at them in the car.

High school bullying was different. There was no recess, so it had to be more surreptitious, because the schedule in high school was more rigorous and teachers and administrators tended not to approve of anything that disturbed the efficient flow of the day. So it would happen on the bus or walking back from lunch. Fights always happened off-campus during lunch, so I guess the bullying followed that model. One guy threatened to kick my ass one day and I had to ask him what his name was because I didn’t even know him. “You don’t need to know my name,” he sneered.

“Well, how can I tell people I’m scared of you if I don’t know your name?”

I’d developed quite a mouth by the age of fourteen. Mainly because I was tired of people’s bullshit. I had to deal with it when I visited my father’s side of the family in Alabama every summer, I had to deal with it from my mother’s then-husband, and now I had to deal with it from perfect strangers every fucking day of high school? Fuck my life, I guess.

The majority of my high school bullies were football players. It didn’t help that I was in the band. And while the pattern of girls passively participating in the bullying continued, at a certain point the bullying just stopped and I can’t explain it any better than the teenage male brain finally started to really develop about junior year, so my last two years of high school were pretty quiet. Maybe it was because everyone was too busy trying to get into college to worry about whether or not the queer kid in their weird clothes is getting it up the butt. I don’t know. It was nice to just go to school and not worry about being beaten to death between lunch and fourth period.

Over the last two years, I’ve received news that two of my bullies from high school have died for whatever reason. Natural causes, I guess, but since I’m pretty much the same age, I like to think they’re too young to die, even if they were shitty to me when they were younger. And of course I did a Google search for their obituaries.

They were both loving husbands and fathers. One was even a grandfather. On Facebook, I found a memorial page for one of them, where his wife (I went to school with her, too) posted daily updates of her journey without him and other people I recognized from high school responded with their memories of what an amazing man he was, how loving and kind he was, what an upstanding Christian man he was. I had to check several times to make sure I was on the right memorial page, but yes—there was his name, right at the top.

After the confusion came anger, and after that came amusement. It was like reading the script for an SNL skit about the death of some dictator. “I will always remember the time he played Jesus in the church Easter play!” Or, to his wife, “He was a great man and you made a great team!” It took everything I had not to post my memories of him on the memorial page, but what stopped me was knowing that if I did that now I would be no better than he was then. And what the hell did I know? Maybe he had evolved into a really great guy. Maybe he regretted being such an asshole to me and the other people he bullied. Maybe he’d wanted to apologize and never got the chance because I moved away and never went back. Who knows?

This past week another friend from high school messaged me and asked if I’d heard that another of the guys who bullied me in high school died. I hadn’t. She was beside herself, she told me. She just couldn’t believe it. I didn’t feel like going through it all again, so I just cut it short with “He and I were never really friends in school, so I haven’t kept in touch.” She got the hint.

But I guess there’s never any real closure with bullies, is there? Or do people get apologies and I’m the odd man out? I’ve never had a single person look me up on any social media platform and message me to say the way they treated me in sixth grade has been eating away at them for forty years and they just wanted to reach out an apologize. And if they did, how would I respond? Would I call bullshit? “I don’t believe you, but if the apology makes you feel better about yourself, then it’s done its job.” Because let me be clear: if my mother’s ex-husband ever did that, those would be my exact words because I will never forgive him. I might have forgiven all the other, but I’ll never forgive him.

So, I guess I just need to wait for him to die like all the ones I’ve heard about. And he’s old, so it shouldn’t be much longer.