So recently a very good friend of mine (Karen) mentioned to the group of gay friends that I hang with most "that she was concerned for me as to what would happen to me in the event of something serious happening to me. Why?, because I am perpetually single.
I don't like being single its not something I would have thought my life would be. I honestly thought that by now I would be in a relationship with a guy that loved me as much as I loved him. I have never not looked for love but admittedly should it have presented itself to me I would in the past have not pursued it either. There is a really long story to this and since this is MY blog I am gonna tell it.
My life has been something that I would not have wished to live as it has been lived. At a very young age I realized I was not interested in girls. When all the other kids were talking about Susie in the school yard I was looking at the guy talking about it and wondering more about him than Susie. I was also the last boy in a family of five kids with one younger sister. I was growing older with no male influences except my father who had an extremely stressful job and his stress release was to work his ass off on mundane projects around the house and the way to involve his youngest boy was to have me clean up after him or hold the nail while he hammered or hold the 4 foot chisel while he swung at it with a 20lb sledge hammer. He was not sadistic in any way or shape I was the last boy at home and the other two had paid their dues to the family and building with dad and up and moved out. I was left with two sister and my mom mostly and what this gave me most was a formal understanding of how to cook and how to clean and how to cry for what I wanted most.
This family is also staunch leftist Christian non-denominational. So staunch that going to the local pool hall to play stand up video games was considered a sin. But pretending to be sick on a Sunday evening during the Stanley Cup play off was not. Another taboo was having too much to do with young guys my own age unless they were kids I had grown up with or went to church with. Meeting an new friend would meet with much scrutiny or trepidation as to who this young guy was. Funny though one of my best friends growing up was a tom boy named Joyce. To this day we are friends and she was the only girl I had anything to do with growing up. Its no wonder either considering for a long time growing up if I got hurt she was involved or was the instigator of the stupid idea that would get one of us hurt. But she was my friend and I would have held that walnut any day while she took a swing at it with the dull hatchet ( thats a very long story too LOL).
Any way with all these variables I was not developing as a young man, No matter what I always seemed to be shirked off into feminine type rolls or activities that would see me involved mostly with things the women folk in the church or on the farm would be doing, simply because of my age and fat boy stature. Yes I was a fat kid.
Most of my grade school years I was a fat boy. It was grueling being the last kid picked for games in school gym class. Being the only one walking home when all the other kids went home in groups. Being berated by older boys or boys my own age cause I was the fat kid. It was really tough being fat and not having much support at home did not help. My father never wanted me to fight battles but to talk my way out of them or to run away and if that did not work he would talk to the father of the kid. We lived in a small town there was one employer in the winter and he was management and most of the other fathers were workers so dad had some push with male conversation about leaving his sissy kid alone. Which was never good for me the next day as it always made the kid in question mad as hell. I remember the most memorable occasion where I asked my dad to back off, he didn't. The very next day some of the older boys ganged up on me and started kicking me in the back so hard that I lost my footing. While lying on the ground in line to go back into school at recess they continued to kick me in the back. I layed on the cold ground under the watchful eye of the then vice principal as he watched the boys put the boots to me, kicking me in the back. The bell rang for us to go in they stopped went back into the building and I continued to lay there listening to the vice principal "Cramp get your lazy ass of the ground or I will tell your parents you are too much trouble to have at school".
I got up went into class, sat gingerly in my desk for the rest of the day, walked my sister home from school and never told a soul. I went about my tasks and evening chores knowing if I told my dad I would get a way worse beating the next day. What really happened late that night and next morning committed to my parents that I had been attacked.
I started pissing blood, I had had my kidney bruised so bad by the relentless pounding of the older boys that they were full of blood. This is what the fat kid put up with in school, my entire grade school years were like this. But to finish that story I stayed home that day and the next. My sister came home from school to tell me that if I did not return the next day the boys who had kicked me would all be receiving the strap and suspensions for one week. I look up from my bed with begging in my eyes for the very first time I asked my mom if she though I should go to school the next day. I needed at that moment, I needed her to protect me and to give me permission to get my druthers at the hands of the school penal system. With a twinkle in her eyes she looked down and me and said "not a chance".
The rest of the school year the guys left me alone but I sure wish they could have got the strap. But such is the life of the fat kid growing up in the 70's.
