FARRAH FAGGOT
The barking woke me. Our dog Duke, a tawny colored, long legged dachshund had his front legs on the arm of the sofa and his hind legs on the cushion, his lean body angled upward as he barked furiously at the two police men standing on the other side of the glass that was the top half of our front door. It was 3 a.m.
I was rubbing my eyes as my mother ran past me to the door. I had been asleep on the sofa, put there by my father before he went out, to a bachelor party, I was told many years later.
Earlier that night, I must have heard something in the kitchen and came down to see what was going on.
“You should be in bed, little boy,” my father said. His thick baritone voice hung like a mist in the air above my five-year-old head. He snatched me up in his arms. His wavy blonde hair was twisted perfectly into a curl that dangled onto the forehead of his big, broad handsome face. His wide chin and his blue eyes, his, “baby blues” as everyone called them, came at me as he blew a raspberry into my neck.
“Where are you going, daddy?” I whispered in his ear so I wouldn’t wake anybody up.
“I’m going to see some friends, now you go back to bed.”
“I don’t want to.” I said as I played with the collar of his shirt.
“How about I put you on the couch,” he whispered into my ear as if we were going on a great adventure, “do you think you’ll be able to sleep down here all by yourself?”
I nodded my head in excitement as I wrapped my little arm around his big neck and squeezed.
“Alright, but when I come home I’m going to put you in your bed so Mommy won’t get mad at me, Okay?” He flipped off the kitchen light and bounced me on his forearm as we walked to the sofa.
“I’m going to leave the light on incase you get up.” He said in a hushed voice.
“I won’t daddy. I’m going to wait here for you.”
He kissed my forehead. As my heavy eyelids fought gravity I heard the door close very quietly. He was gone.
* * * *
There is a substantial difference between my second grade school photo and my forth grade school photo. In my second grade photo I’m thin and cute. In my fourth grade photo I’m chubby, with big red cheeks, my chin had all but disappeared into my neck and I’m wearing my older brother’s jacket because it was one of the few things that would fit me.
School photos were only taken every other year, so my transitional year is undocumented.
As every child does, I blame my mother for whatever happened between grades two and four to make me gain thirty pounds.
My mother, Pat, was a thin attractive woman who smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes almost obsessively. Within her 5 foot 6 inch frame she housed a canyon of rage and an ocean of disgust, those vast spaces void of compassion. Pat was incapable of showing any sort of emotion, so the task of helping her children, my brother Shane – 9, my sisters, the twins, Abby and Annie – 8 and me – 5, process the tragic death of our father who was killed by a drunk driver in the early morning hours of the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1969, was just not going to happen.
At some point after my father’s funeral and Christmas and New Years had passed, it was decided by my mother that it was too difficult to talk about my father or his death. Whenever I would ask her anything about him, I was met with a quick and deliberate,
“I can’t talk about this!!” Then through almost-tears, “I just can’t.”
Maybe she really couldn’t. Maybe she was traumatized from his death as well. I don’t know because she never shared her feelings or her sadness or sorrow about losing her husband with her children. I’ve always wondered what the car ride home from the hospital that morning was like for her. What was going on in her head in the backseat of my grandparent’s car on the way home to tell your four children, all under the age of ten, that daddy is dead? I can’t envision how much pain she was in and I also can’t imagine being able to turn something that monumental off for the rest of your life.
We were all left with a gaping wound that was never attended to. The ugly scab has smothered our entire lives. As the youngest and most emotional sibling, I lived dramatically in the pain and the hollow space of never knowing who my father was.
The huge holes in my heart and soul needed something to fill them. So, I turned to sugar to help me through the pain. Sugar made me happy and by the third grade, it had also made me fat. I wore ‘husky’ pants, I had breasts, and being an Irish lad, my cheeks were bright red. I looked like a girl, wearing blush and no training bra.
Our half of the two-family house my mother rented was a warzone. The siblings and I hated each other. Aggressively. We were like caged wild animals, scratching and clawing and roaring at each other, and Pat was the ringleader, never calming us down only showing us how to do more damage. She would start shrieking at the crack of dawn to, “get the hell out of bed.” That alarm was ignored which would drive her insane and prompted more screaming from the bottom of the stairs. She would work herself up into such a frenzy threatening, “I’m going to come up there and rip your God damn face off.”
“Every morning you wait until the last God damn horn blows.” As an adult I wonder why she never let us live in the consequences of oversleeping to teach us a lesson. But then I realized, how would we have known she loved us without all of that concern oozing out of her mouth.
What would follow was a Lord of the Flies frenzy as four young children tried to win the rights to the one small bathroom in the house so we could make it to the bus stop on time. Annie, the angriest child, would win every morning, pushing us out and locking the door. As the three of us banged on the door and screamed at Annie, Pat, whose job was done, was able to finally sip her coffee and read the paper in peace – her ability to tune out the chaos has always baffled me.
As I got older, one of the things my siblings loved to call me was ‘gay” or “a sissy,” “Oh my God, Timmy you’re so gay, you sound like a girl!” I didn’t know what gay really meant and although I grew weary of hearing it, most of the time it would get lost in the crossfire of four damaged, screaming children and one rageaholic mother.
For Christmas in 1977 I had gotten a new tape recorder and I recorded everything. TV shows, ABBA songs and private conversations. I found one of the two-hour cassette tapes last year and I was appalled. One hundred and twenty minutes of me being a huge sissy demanding to be the center of attention, with hands on hips and naturally over stressed S’s. And while, I’m not condoning the fact that the siblings called me “gay,” or “sissy,” it’s just that in reviewing the tape I realize they had no choice.
My six years in our local elementary school were pleasant. School had become a refuge from the yelling and screaming at home. At school there were no expectations as to who I was supposed to be, or how I was supposed to act so it was a nice little cocoon for me, with zero drama. But when I started middle school, that’s when life as I knew it was over.
The transitional year of seventh grade was a bumpy one and I learned a very valuable lesson on day two; don’t ever open your mouth in school again. I quickly found out that the siblings were wrong, I didn’t speak like a girl, I spoke like a faggot.
After a few exuberant hand raises and question answerings on my part, the boys in three of my classes started coughing, “Faggggot” before or after I answered the question. It wasn’t a group cough, they staggered it, “fagggggot” faggggot” “faggot” for maximum humiliation. School had quickly gone from being an escape to another combat zone I’d have to lean to maneuver.
From Day Two of seventh grade until I graduated I never raised my hand to answer a question and would just give a mute shrug if I were called on. This didn’t stop them from calling me a faggot it just lessened the opportunity.
The cafeteria was like walking through a huge florescent light filled minefield. I would think I was doing well, trying to scurry as fast as I could to the back of the room, and somewhere in the middle of what seemed like an endless journey to the table of misfits – SLAM into my head goes a roll or orange or an apple. If I was lucky it would hit my head, the worst was when it hit the tray and my lunch would go flying everywhere. The deafening roar of hundreds of teenagers talking stopped. There was about a second or two of complete silence before the laughter and applause would kick in. And then,
“Nice catch faggot.” Or some form of that statement would follow as I shuffled, defeated, to my seat at the table of the other targets.
The cream-colored cinderblock hallways were no better. I’d almost make it to English class and BAM from out of nowhere my books would be kicked from my hand; papers flying in the air and across the floor, and a chorus of howls from the audience with me on my hands and knees trying to grab the loose sheets of paper and chase my books which kept getting kicked further down the hall by some football team asshole,
“Oh here’s your book faggot.” I’d quickly crawl to it and, kick,
“Oh there it goes buddy you’re just not fast enough faggot.”
The entire time I was just praying for it to be over, desperately waiting for the bell to ring and the halls to clear. Then I’d gather the last of my papers and run to class, late again, red faced and out of breath, trying quietly to open the heavy wooden door and slither into my seat hoping nobody would turn and see me.
A few months into the school year as everyone was filing into the Social Studies classroom, Alan Durkin stopped at my desk to have a chat with me. I tried to ignore him by staring straight ahead but he wouldn’t leave. As I turned my head he put his face so close to mine that our noses touched and he half whispered,
“Hey faggot. Do you even know what a faggot is?” Which I did not, but my mouth was so dry I couldn’t even make a sound, so I just sat there silent. Trembling. Heart pounding. As he grinned saliva bubbles filled the holes in his shiny braces.
“It’s a guy who sucks another guys dick. Is that what you do? Because you are a faggot.” My entire body was shaking, and as he straightened up he said,
“Just kidding.” Then before he walked away, BAM! He punched me so hard in the side of my head that it bounced off the cinderblock wall I was sitting next to. As he strutted away he said,
“No, I’m not kidding, you are a faggot.”
None of it made any sense to me. The fact that I was a target, the fact that he punched me in the head, the whole sucking dick thing, it was all too much to process so I just sat there silently thanking God that my seat was right by the door so I could run out of class and down the hall before Alan could spot me. Seventh grade really sucked.
The anxiety of going back to school for eighth grade made the last couple of weeks summer a nightmare for me because I knew I’d never escape those assholes. Then my mother got a letter from the school, which said, that this year boys would have to take Home Ec. as an elective along with one shop class. In years prior boys would split the school year, half wood shop and half metal shop and girls were only allowed to take Home Ec.
I was delighted by the fact that I’d only have to take one shop class this year since my wood and metal shop classes did not go well the previous year.
In wood shop everyone made the same thing, a small wooden footstool, which was called, “The Bernie Bench,” named after the man who taught wood shop, Bernie Beltz. He was old and nasty and did not like “little sissy boys who can’t level a stool.”
In metal shop we had to make a sugar scoop out of sheet metal. Mine was almost recognizable as a sugar scoop and I was pretty impressed with myself. Unfortunately I almost burned the metal shop classroom down because I was so busy staring at John Freeman. He was 14 and had a full beard of stubble and dark brown hair, feathered and parted in the middle. He was…a god. I was so busy wondering if I would ever have hair that beautiful, that I forgot to cradle my soldering gun correctly and it fell onto the work bench while the teacher was reminding us about the importance of safety goggles.
Before I knew it, people were laughing and pointing at me – something I had recently gotten used to. I didn’t know what was going on so ignored them and continued to stare at John’s hair, What would be like to touch that hair, I thought. Then Mr. Watson ran over with a fire extinguisher and pushed me to the ground as he blew everything off the table with one shot from the extinguisher.
“Hedden,” he spat at me from above, “I don’t get you.”
But this year things were going to be different; I’d go back to metal shop and then I’d be able to let loose a bit in the home ec suite! This was a relief to me because to women I was not a ‘sissy boy,’ I was charming and funny, and I was sure I’d be a hit with Miss Jenkins, the home ec teacher.
Breezing into the Home Ec suite on day one with a huge grin on my face I was greeted stares and sneers of all of my biggest fans from shop class. I thought I would be escaping these Neanderthals but of course they here, mandated by the school. Something I had overlooked in my excitement at the thought of learning how to make funnel cakes.
Now I had to deal with the grim reality that the calls of “faggot,” would not stop for the 43 minutes of class, which I had really been counting on since it was pretty much on a loop from 7:30 when I got on the bus till 2:45 when I got off the bus at the end of the day.
What the fuck was I going to do now? Luckily I remembered that Alan from Social Studies class last year told me what a faggot was, so I came up with a plan!
Charlie’s Angles was a huge hit on TV and I was obsessed with it, and Farrah Fawcett, the beautiful breakout star of the show. Her face, body and nipples were all over everything; posters, coffee mugs, tee shirts, they even had Charlie’s Angels bubble gum trading cards. My half of the bedroom was covered in all of those cards, with a big poster of Farrah in the middle.
I loved her! Again, that hair.
My plan was to tell everyone how beautiful I thought she was and how much I loved her. Problem solved! What kind of faggot knows everything about Farrah Fawcett? I was so sure this would shut those fuckers up.
I knew everything about her. I could even recite her lines from last week’s episode. (I loved that tape recorder.) Everyday I would tell a different fact about Farrah.
“Did you know that is her real name. Farrah Leni Fawcett, although her parents originally spelled it F E R R A H, someone in Hollywood thought the A would make more sense.”
“Did you also know that before Charlie’s Angels she was on The Flying Nun AND I Dream of Jeanine?”
I pontificated everyday for weeks as I tried to get my flower and water consistency perfect for the funnel cake.
“Blah Blah Farrah this, blah blah Charlie’s Angels that. Blah blah she has beautiful hair and I have her blah blah blah poster RIGHT over my bed.” It seemed to be working! Nobody was calling me a faggot and I thought they were all grateful to learn these tidbits of information about the worlds biggest and brightest star!
I was wrong.
One day, Dave Burns, one of the shop class douche bags, had had enough of me, and my lover Miss Farrah. He slammed his hands down so hard on the counter that his funnel cake batter went all over the place,
“Just shut up man, you’re a faggot. You’re a little faggot. You are Farrah Faggot.”
Time stood still.
Mixers turned off, stirring of batter ceased, heads turned and my stomach dropped. I could feel my face getting red as everyone gawked at me.
I’m not sure which was more stunning to me, that he had managed to mix the two worlds together; the beautiful world of my Farrah and the ugly world of that word, or was it the fact that everyone was laughing hysterically at me.
As I steadied myself it all hit me at once, they were all chanting it.
“Farrah Faggot, Farrah Faggot, Farrah Faggot, Farrah Faggot”
There were no actual, “Good One, Dave” slaps on the back, but that was the feeling in the room. And there I was, flour all over my sleeves, my face by now crimson, and on the verge of crying. But not here I can’t cry here, and where is Miss Jenkins to save my ass?
Suddenly the whole class was in on the fun. It seemed that nobody had bought the fact that Farrah and me were the new IT couple and it was obvious from the chants that they were all sick of my invaluable trivia. Quickly the chanting got worse and louder, “Farrah Faggot!”
Finally when Miss Jenkins flew in from the sewing room, I broke down and sobbed. Ugly, baby gasping for air, long whales sobs. Even though my head was buried in her chest and she was telling them to stop, they didn’t.
“Farrah Faggot, Farrah Faggot, Farrah Faggot, Farrah Faggot”
As she dragged me out of the room, Burns and some other kid were still at it laughing and yelling,
“Farrah Faggot what’s the matter little Faggot?” Which seamed to echo endlessly off of the empty cinderblock hallway walls.
And with a slam of the door, the laughter silenced, replaced with Miss Jenkins telling me,
“It’s okay, it’s over now, okay?” I sniffed, gasped for air and cried. “It’s over now. Sh sh shhhhh, ooooohkay”
I was taken to the nurse’s office; Miss Jenkins, the nurse and the principle all looking at me like I was an alien, and then back at each other as if to say, “Well, I don’t know what to do.”
As they went to discuss the options in the principle’s office, I sat there by myself, tears still falling from my round, red-face. My body jerked with involuntary shutters, there were a few residual sniffs of snot, and I began wondering, why? Why were those boys so mean. Why were they all so mean. That was what I could never wrap my head around, the ‘mean’ thing. I was annoying yes, but I never talked to those guys, I never said anything to anyone – because of what happened the previous year on my second day of school.
So there I sat, dazed and shaking because I couldn’t figure out why.
A minute or two later, I realized I was going to have to go back into that room.
I felt nauseous, my head and heart started pounding, and more tears fell. It was all too much. I just shut it all off. I stared straight ahead like a zombie.
Miss Jenkins, the nurse and principle finally came back into the room and told me they called my mom and that my brother was on the way to pick me up and take me home. I remember every second of that car ride. Not a word from him. Not a word from me. I got home and ran to my room and fell asleep. I heard my mom come home from work. I thought she’d stop in on the way to her room to see how I was doing.
No.
She changed and went to cook dinner and when it was ready she called me to the table. By now my sisters had to know what had happened and yet, nothing was ever said to me. No comfort. No hugging. No, “don’t listen to them.” Nothing. It was a normal dinner for the four of them and they all talked around me. I don’t know what I was feeling, but whatever it was had to be a familiar sense of not mattering.
When I was done I went up to my room and lay on my bed in the dark and stared at the ceiling. This would have been a great time to have Carol Brady as a mother, to come sit on my bed and tell me how much she loved me and that we were going to get through it together, but Carol Brady didn’t live here and for the next three days my mother barely spoke to me, and she never said anything about the home ec incident.
I went to school the next day and roamed the halls in an altered state. I walked into the Home Ec room dead on the inside and the outside. I figured that I had gotten the worst of their hate and disgust for me so anything else they wanted to throw at me I’d be able to deal with. But nobody said a word. People looked and stared and some laughedalmost silently, but nobody called me a faggot that day. I’m sure Miss Jenkins had a word with them after she took me too the office.
I never spoke again in that class and was left alone for the rest of the semester. They still screamed Farrah Faggot in the halls and the cafeteria for the rest of the year but I’d pretend not to hear them.
The next year they redistricted my area and I got sent to the other middle school, which was a relief. Nobody knew about Farrah Faggot there, of course the Faggot part stuck around until I graduated and was used frequently on a daily basis. Also, I did become acquainted with the inside of many a locker, but I think that the Home Ec incident had busted me on the inside. For the next four years when someone pushed me, kicked me, kicked my books out of my hands, threw me down the stairs, called me Faggot in class, or pissed in my shoes in gym class, I was able to shut it off. Shut myself down like I did in the nurse’s office.
Many, many years later – Mother’s Day 2010, I took my mother to brunch. One of my nieces was there and she was telling us about how her sister was being bullied in school. My mother got all up in arms,
“Well, if one of my kids was being bullied, I’d march right up to the school and put a stop to that!”
What the fuck did she just say? I thought to myself.
I could feel my face getting red, my heart begin to pound and that old stomach drop. Forty years later and Farrah Faggot reared its ugly head in the middle of Mother’s Day Brunch!
Six years of being bullied, ridiculed, spat upon, kicked, punched, laughed at; only six years out of my vast life but I can’t get those voices out of my head. To this day I am still fighting the demons that people, who probably don’t even remember me, released into my life. I will fight these voices of doubt and self-shame until the day I die and the fact that my mother could lie so boldly and say that she would have swooped in to save me was a blow to the gut.
I wanted to stand up, throw my napkin on the table and scream,
“You’re a fucking liar! Remember when I was in eighth grade and had been bullied so badly in Home Ec. that they didn’t know what to do with me? And you didn’t speak to me for three fucking days?! You never said a word to the school, you didn’t do anything.”
My husband could see that I was getting ready to explode and grabbed my hand and squeezed it gently. I looked at him and he said, “I love you.” And gave me a wink.
I had a choice to make, do I make a scene and ruin Mother’s Day for my 74-year-old mother or not? What would it get me? I thought. Instead I excused myself from the table and went into a stall in the men’s room leaned against the wall. I didn’t cry. I took a deep breath and then another. I decided that this was not the time or place to call my mother out. I let out a laugh so big that I literally bent over. “She’s got balls, that woman. Big ones,” I said out loud. I washed my hands, splashed water on my face, went back to the table, and took a deep breath. I flipped my imaginary feathered blond hair off my shoulder and smiled as I ran through all of the fun facts that I forgot that I knew about the beautiful Farrah Leni Fawcett.