I was having great fun with the cheerleaders. “Look at my pom poms, not my breasts! Yaaaaay breasts! I mean pom poms! Watch me kick and show my panties! Yaaaaaaay PANTIES!” You can tell a number of things from this. First, I had (and have) an odd sense of humor. Second, I was perhaps not as sexually mature as other boys my age.

Louisiana is a magical place. I learned that the hard way.
I moved here when I was ten from New York. Not the city, one of suburbs more toward Albany, but who gives a fuck? Had a different accent, my parents had more money than most other people’s parents did. My father was an architect and Katrina gave him some work. Point is most of the people living in my district weren’t doing so hot, and from their perspective, I was a stuck up prick. As far as I was concerned, they were greedy little assholes, most of them. So stereotypes persisted.
Actually I pretty much was a stuck up prick. Maybe I still am, well, except for the prick part, but we’re getting to that. Basically I tend to dislike stupid people. This is a real problem for me. A lot of people are stupid and just can’t help it. Mentally challenged folks, young children, senile old people, politicians… they all give me the creeps. It’s not like I have any reason to think I’m any better , I’ve done plenty stupid things, it just weirds me out when someone says something or does something inane. I don’t understand it. But what pisses me off about some people is how they can be so proud of their stupidity.
Like pep rallies.
This is relevant, I assure you. I was twelve, so I had been going to school in Imaginaire, Louisiana for about two years. There were one or two kids I found tolerable, who found me tolerable too, and since I was, well… lonely I guess is the only way to put it, on account of being a stuck up prick, I hung out with them every chance I got. There was Mike Thatcher, who was I guess my best friend by virtue of me having classes with him and hence spending more time with him: taller than me, blond hair in bowl cut and wearing glasses, yet still weirdly athletic. Big track nerd. Liked to run. And there was Bobby Singh. He was Indian. He spoke three other languages that I had never heard of as well as English, which he spoke without any accent I could discern. He was outgoing and liked people, which kind of clashed with my general aesthetic, but the three languages thing and his grades kind of impressed me, and really even the outgoing part was something I wanted to be able to pull off. Also I liked how he confused some people by not really being black.
The year of my first pep Rally, my first year in Junior high, there was all this lead up. “The pep Rally is coming!” teachers would enthuse, “Get ready for that Pep Rally, we’re really going to raise the roof!” I should note that the expression “raise the roof” had already by this time entered the leaky oubliette of old slang terms that are no longer cool. I have to admit I was getting excited. By the way everyone was going on about it, it was going to be like Christmas or something. So I’d ask what it was all about. Mike said “It’s a school get together to get students interested in sports.”
“You mean, like track and field?” I asked, because I was marginally interested in that, what with Mike being involved. I even tried running with him a little, but I have absolutely no stamina and had to slow down about a quarter down the track.
Mike frowned. “No, mostly football and basketball.”
I blinked. Running I could understand. You never knew when you might need to run toward or away something. I kind of wanted to get better at that myself, aside from being lazy. Moving a piece of leather from one side of a room or field to the other and then doing it again repeatedly seemed completely useless to me at the time. Now that I’ve been exposed to it more I can sort of see the draw. There’s a lot of skill involved, even an artistry that you can respect if you get into it. But to me at the time the whole idea was mind numbingly stupid. “Why does everyone care so much?”
Bobby slapped me on the shoulder, “It’s fun, man. People around here don’t have much to do.”
“How come this is the first I’ve heard about it? Why don’t they have pep rallies all the time?”
Mike actually scowled. “They want people to go to the football games. It gets the school money.” Football. Not track or anything else.
“No pep rallies for chess, or math competitions either then?” Bobby, I knew competed in both of those. I did too, but he actually did well in them. By Bobby’s and Mike’s silence, I knew there weren’t. “So, basically this whole thing amounts to a giant advertisement for stuff none of us care about?”
“Yeah. Pretty much,” Mike said.
“I’m not going.”
“You gotta go,” Bobby said. “It’s required.”
As it turned out, I didn’t have to go. When the time came every one was led out of the classrooms and when I stayed in my seat defiantly reading a Terry Pratchett novel the teacher said that if I didn’t want to go to the pep rally I could go to the library. Only the way she said LIBRARY it was like it was the most loathsome thing in the world. I loved the library. Despite it not being very good I could spend hours there reading whatever caught my attention. But the teacher was saying it like it would be some kind of punishment. Like being sent to your room. You’re all like, “fine that’s cool with me. I’ve got my TV, books, and computer over there. In fact I was planning on going there anyway.” Only it isn’t cool. Somehow being forced to do it spoils it. The teacher was effectively being like the psychologist in A Clockwork Orange, trying to make me hate the thing I loved through aversion therapy. It’s really screwed up if you think of it. The teacher, at my SCHOOL, which was supposed to be all about learning, was threatening to send me to the LIBRARY if I didn’t attend some stupid advertisement campaign for a sports team.
You’d think this would be a major issue. But what do schools do with their funding? Buy a bunch of computers that no one is allowed to touch.
Long story short, I caved. I followed the rest of the children to the pep rally like the gullible little lamb I was. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, I rationalized, there must be something good about it if so many people want to go.
It’s a terrible exaggeration, but I can’t help but think that the feeling must have been very similar to what the kool-aid drinkers felt when they were getting on the plane to Jonestown. Of course I didn’t know about Jonestown until I saw a documentary on the internet about it a couple of years later. At the time my thoughts were more along the lines of “This is dumb. Why am I doing this?”
Luckily, Bobby and Mike were equally enslaved to the hive mind, and sitting with them I was able to enjoy myself by MST3King the whole event. For those that may be unaware of what that means, I basically mocked everyone involved, putting words in their mouth and making rude sound effects. Absolutely hilarious for me and my friends. For anyone actually interested in what’s going on, it’s maybe a bit annoying.
Maybe.
I was having great fun with the cheerleaders. “Look at my pom poms, not my breasts! Yaaaaay breasts! I mean pom poms! Watch me kick and show my panties! Yaaaaaaay PANTIES!” You can tell a number of things from this. First, I had (and have) an odd sense of humor. Second, I was perhaps not as sexually mature as other boys my age.

Still Bobby and Mike laughed, so I felt encouraged. This was a little dangerous. You know that kid who does something crazy and silly and someone else(usually female) rolls her eyes and says “Stop, you’ll only encourage him?” I’m that kid. I don’t need any psychotropic chemicals to set me off, just a few people who laugh at my jokes. Next thing I know, I’m doing weird dances, putting people down, mouthing off about politics and religion and generally being a dumbass. “That’s really freaky actually,” Bobby said, still smiling. “You really sound like a girl when you do that.”
Now this is another embarrassing fact. I was actually proud of this. I practiced doing all sorts of voices, starting with the Monty Python characters and going into Christopher Walken and Bill Clinton. I had whole scenes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC television series memorized as well as several scenes from Mystery Men. A year or so previous I had encountered a sizable roadblock in my pursuit of the perfect recreation of the scenes. I couldn’t do female voices. But I worked at it whenever I was alone, recording myself with a tape recorder, altering things a little and then trying again, until I got it down. It took me awhile, my voice had changed and I couldn’t quite change it back so I had to sort of work around it. I found singing along with Alanis Morrisette or Sheryl Crow to be helpful, the way they would sort of sing, sort of just talk sometimes really gave me something to emulate. And then I had to stop when I accidently answered the phone in my Alanis voice and the person on the other line called me “Miss.”
That scared me and for a month or so I didn’t try to do any female voices. Except of course the skits with female parts in them kept coming into my head whenever I’d be alone in the bathroom and I’d have go to a Monty Python skit to avoid doing what I was thinking about. Even Monty Python gets a little old sometimes. I was beginning to think maybe I had a problem. But now suddenly my work was paying off. Someone actually said I sounded like a girl!
Yeah, I’m weird.

Maybe if I wasn’t already buzzed up with attention I would have kept going, maybe I would have remembered that sounding like a girl is only a good thing if no one knows you can do it. Instead I kept going. “Oh, Bobby, you’re so sexy, you just bring it out in me.”
“Stop it, man, you’re freaking me out,” but Bobby was laughing, so I kept going.
“Do you like this outfit?” I said straightening my back and using my hands to indicate my jeans and sweatshirt. “I chose it especially for you. Touch it, Bobby! I want your hands all over me!” And suddenly I was at that uncomfortable moment where you realize you’ve taken a joke too far.
But then a voice from behind me shouted, “Shut up, bitch. Flirt with your boyfriend later.”
It was a black girl, wearing short shorts and a tank top. She was pretty, but darker than even most other folks of African descent. Which I guess is a bit unhelpful since everyone is of African descent, but yeah she was like an inverse albino. And she was being rather rude.
I couldn’t stop myself. “Oh I’m not a bitch, honey.” I said in my black woman impersonation, “I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.”
Understand that from my perspective, not being aware of transsexuals and the subtle distinctions between them and homosexuals and transvestites, I thought I was essentially saying that I was a heterosexual man, only making it sound like I wasn’t. I found this funny, but there were only a few other people who seemed to get it. Most people assumed I was saying that I was gay, and I had to explain to them how funny I was being. Realizing the potential for further confusion, I shifted to my deep gravelly-voiced Texan impersonation and said. “Come over here an’ I’ll letcha see mah trouser snake.”
“I’ll come over there, all right,” the girl said getting up. She looked very tall from my seated position on the bleacher in front of her. I was just thinking that maybe I should get up myself when she grasped my shirt with both hands, picked me up and threw me down the bleachers. This had the over all effect of calling a great deal of attention toward me and the girl, and also causing me a great deal of pain. It felt worse that it was; I just sprained my wrist, cushioned as I was by the heads of my fellow students. Thankfully none of them suffered any neck injuries. And I managed not to cry, which would have been really bad PR, especially following the whole, “beaten by a girl” stigma. Personally I didn’t see what the difference was between being beaten up by a girl or a boy, but I knew getting beaten up by a girl was supposed to be worse. Odd, because you also weren’t supposed to hit girls, giving girls the overall advantage in a fight. But I didn’t make the rules.
The administration of the school, in a nod toward fairness, gave Shaquonda LaRue, my assailant, detention, while I only got a demerit. It didn’t seem that fair to Shaquonda though. I can sort of see where she was coming from thinking back on it. Something like “I get detention while that stuck up white faggot is let off with a demerit? He was being racist too, and making fun of the pep rally.”
Shaquonda, as I later learned, was a member of the women’s basketball team, which more or less put her in the pro pep rally camp.
I had to withstand a great deal of ridicule when I returned to the public sphere after my brief time in the principal’s office. My father, being a big fan of the Evil Dead movies, and having Jurisdiction over the male baby names, christened me Bruce Ashley Patterson. I usually went by “Ash” because that’s what my Dad called me. Mom had the unfortunate tendency to call me Ashley, but I didn’t realize this was odd until a helpful peer informed me that Ashley was supposed to be a girl’s name. Well actually it was more like a sneering, belligerent peer. I didn’t really care for Bruce though. Sounded like somebody who would like football or weight-lifting. Don’t know where I got that impression, what with all the great Bruces out there, Bruce Banner, Bruce Wayne, and my namesake Bruce Campbell, but that was kind of in my head and as I may have mentioned I was a stuck up prick.
It really didn’t come up very often usually. I wasn’t a paragon of masculinity, but I didn’t usually look like a girl either and people just get used to it being a guy’s name. The starting quarterback for the football team was named Leslie afterall.
Oh did it come back to me now though. My two compatriots weren’t the only ones who saw my performance, and getting beaten up by a girl calls ones masculinity into serious question. In between period some guys, probably closet homosexuals, were calling me Ashley and asking me out on dates in exaggerated tones, then snickering to each other like crows at a slaughter. Well I guess crows don’t snicker. I was kind of thinking of the movie Dumbo with that one I think.
Moving on.
Patience is not one of my virtues. The third time this propositioning happened, something in me broke. I just gave up trying to be stoic about the whole thing. I used a girl voice that had a lot of Alanis in it, only snootier and said, “I’d never date a jerk like you.”
This scared the crap out of them. They skittered away like scarab beetles from an open sarcophagus. It was great. I had a new way to torture stupid people. Of course I knew on some level it would bite me in the ass later, but I didn’t care just then.
Spanish class was my favorite class that semester. It gave me an excuse to use a foreign accent in public. We were doing my favorite thing that day, reading exercises. There would be a story in Spanish and everyone in class would take turns reading paragraphs. My paragraph had, joy of joys, a piece of dialogue from the “heroine” of the story, Carmen, who was trying to find her hat, only she couldn’t remember where it was.
[Entonces, Carmen tiene una idea: _ ¡tal vez mi sombrero es en la biblioteca!_
_ ¿En la biblioteca?_ Raul le pide, _ ¿Está¡s segura?_
_Creo que si,_ repueste Carmen, _ ¡voy a buscar por mi sombrero en la biblioteca!_]
I went all telenovela on their asses. Raul was a real smoky Antonio Banderas, and Carmen was a saucy latina. Several people laughed at my portrayal. If I could have, I would have read the whole thing. Spanish was one of the few things I could consistently get A’s in.
And so I went home in an inordinately good mood, while in detention Shaquonda steamed on medium heat in a broth of bad news.