though, some snakes: six or eight or more punks, males in their late teens or early twenties. I can call them neither boys nor men. It is possible that I recall my boyhood with a nostalgia that distorts, that too partially compares those years in the early nineteen fifties with what I see now. But I do not believe this. I would vividly remember seeing a boy shoving or striking or choking a girl. Certainly in the adult world, behind windows and walls, men were beating women. But not where we could see them, even when we were sixteen and drank in the two night clubs that, in Lafayette, Louisiana, would serve us liquor; and the other clubs in nearby towns, where we drank and played the jukebox, sometimes with dates, sometimes without: four or five of us boys at a table, drinking gin bucks or Seven and Sevens or bourbon and Cokes or Falstaffs, and smoking Lucky Strikes or Philip Morris from brown packages, and wearing ducktails and suede shoes. Not even in those clubs where older couples drank and danced, college students and working people: cheerful and feisty Cajuns and Creoles, with accents whose source was eighteenth-and nineteenth-century French, and a few drawling southerners, most of them Protestants. Not even there, in the dark and the music, among couples who were lovers or married, and so on the dance floor and at the tables there were elements of violence: passion and heartbreak as tangible as the sweat soaking through their shirts and blouses, and dripping on their brows, their cheeks.
But we never saw a man hit a woman; and if we had, I know that the other men and boys would not have watched. They would have left their girls and women at the tables and on the dance floor and swarmed on the woman-hitter before the bouncer or bartender could reach him. In the Marine Corps I knew a staff sergeant who told me of sitting one night at a bar in San Francisco. A couple beside him were quarreling. Then the man slapped the woman, knocking her off the stool onto the floor. The sergeant got up and punched the man and knocked him to the floor. The man and woman then turned on the sergeant, the woman using a beer bottle on his head, and during his beating the sergeant realized they were husband and wife, and so vowed never again to interfere with marriages, save on an adulterous bed. But that was in the late fifties or early sixties, and my high school and college years in bars were in the fifties, and everything has changed now, and no one seems to know why, and I donât know why, and to blame it on female liberation is I believe not too simple, but too shallow.
I spent much of my boyhood as a moving target for bullies, both the perennials who bloomed each fall and lived in the classroom and at recess through the school year, then in May were gone; and the occasional bullies of summer: boys on a baseball diamond or at the public swimming pool or at the golf course or dances at the community center. When I got my driverâs license at sixteen, I weighed 105 pounds. The following summer, construction work and beer-drinking gave me twenty more. Then I was a high school senior. Then I was an eighteen-year-old, 125-pound college freshman, destined by my body and my feelings about it to enter a Marine officer candidate program. I record these pounds because for a long time, much too long, I believed they alone were the scents that drew a bully as garbage in the sea draws sharks. My two sons were both small boys, and they drew bullies too, until the oldest, while still in high school, built himself a new body with barbells and dumbells, and the youngest simply grew broad and tall and strong. The bullying did not stop, though, until each of them had stood his ground and fought and won and learned that inside his body each had a spirit which demanded respect from itself, and would prefer injury to cowardice. My sons are grown men now, and we often talk about bullies, and what they did to us, and why they did it.
Our size was not
But we never saw a man hit a woman; and if we had, I know that the other men and boys would not have watched. They would have left their girls and women at the tables and on the dance floor and swarmed on the woman-hitter before the bouncer or bartender could reach him. In the Marine Corps I knew a staff sergeant who told me of sitting one night at a bar in San Francisco. A couple beside him were quarreling. Then the man slapped the woman, knocking her off the stool onto the floor. The sergeant got up and punched the man and knocked him to the floor. The man and woman then turned on the sergeant, the woman using a beer bottle on his head, and during his beating the sergeant realized they were husband and wife, and so vowed never again to interfere with marriages, save on an adulterous bed. But that was in the late fifties or early sixties, and my high school and college years in bars were in the fifties, and everything has changed now, and no one seems to know why, and I donât know why, and to blame it on female liberation is I believe not too simple, but too shallow.
I spent much of my boyhood as a moving target for bullies, both the perennials who bloomed each fall and lived in the classroom and at recess through the school year, then in May were gone; and the occasional bullies of summer: boys on a baseball diamond or at the public swimming pool or at the golf course or dances at the community center. When I got my driverâs license at sixteen, I weighed 105 pounds. The following summer, construction work and beer-drinking gave me twenty more. Then I was a high school senior. Then I was an eighteen-year-old, 125-pound college freshman, destined by my body and my feelings about it to enter a Marine officer candidate program. I record these pounds because for a long time, much too long, I believed they alone were the scents that drew a bully as garbage in the sea draws sharks. My two sons were both small boys, and they drew bullies too, until the oldest, while still in high school, built himself a new body with barbells and dumbells, and the youngest simply grew broad and tall and strong. The bullying did not stop, though, until each of them had stood his ground and fought and won and learned that inside his body each had a spirit which demanded respect from itself, and would prefer injury to cowardice. My sons are grown men now, and we often talk about bullies, and what they did to us, and why they did it.
Our size was not
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