The Wikiness

My first physical fight with another male occurs shortly after we move to 1022 S. Scoville. I was five years old. In the backyard, under the cherry tree, one of my soon-to-be playmates, a couple of years older than I, had somehow provoked me. We fell to pushing and grappling, and pretty soon he got me in a choke hold with his arm tightening around my throat.  I did what felt natural. I bit his arm, and he released me immediately. 

“Ah-h-hgh!” he cried. I was free. 

My opponent hopped up and down, holding his bleeding arm and decrying my violation of a male rule I hadn’t known existed. “You flippin’ bit me! I can’t believe you bit me! Only girls bite!”

I thereafter steer clear of this instinctual way of fighting. Going forward, I constrain myself to merely punching, tripping, and kicking my fellows. 

The unspoken rules in the American male game, 1968: “Play sports. Beat each other. See who’s king.”

For years after moving in, I meet the boys on playgrounds and ball fields in all seasons. Occasional fights erupt, and the loser goes home, sometimes in tears, but the game continues. And the next day, the loser returns, a bit lower in the pecking order, but still a good companion.

I saw the same sort of unreal, performative violence on the Chicago Blackhawks games I saw at night on TV–fighting would break out and often continue until blood flowed and the refs broke it up. Fighting was penalized, but it could also be the game’s celebrated highlight. After the whistle,  the blood still congealing on the ice, the game went on. I accepted this order of things for a good while. 

But the Hawks, and violent movies, and “hard rock,” and even Sgt. Rock comics no longer held much appeal to 11-year-old me. This sprang from a variety of sources: my shame over sucker-punching Alex Bernhardt on the playground, my reading of books that told true stories of Marines in the Pacific, almost blowing my own or Ricky Nevins’ head off with a 12 guage shotgun shell, the horrible wound I gave Marilyn, our Cairn Terrier, when raging against my sister Sheila.

I thought twice now before giving in to the violence urge. Thus, my path diverged from the young males of my neighborhood.

By seventh grade, my heart had moved on from sports to the kind of legitimacy only earned in the “civilized,” feminine culture of school. My achievements there–top student in all but math, captain of the WIT team, MVP of his Divisional Team, DJ at all school SocHops, and eventual runner-up for class president–made me a threat to other rising males.

One of these was the middle son of a huge Irish Catholic family, Eugene. Well acquainted with giving and taking beatings, Eugene let it be known that he would “kick my ass” on the way to or from school, and if I didn’t stand up to him, I was “a pussy.” 

“Well,” thought I. “I’ll avoid him.”

I knew he would publicly defeat me, and I wanted to spare myself the humiliation.  I spent a week leaving school at ridiculously late hours, arriving early, or by odd routes, and thus signaled to Eugene my unwillingness to fight him. Thereby and forever after, I branded myself a “pussy,” an unserious male in their society.

My new path leads to another, advantageous society. So did it really matter what the boys thought?

NOTE: Top image–screetshot of Robert Frost’s final stanza of “The Road Not Taken.” Main image–generated by Google’s Gemini when asked for “American suburban boys fight in the 1960s.”