Continuing the writings of experiences in the life of a young TS, in the years before the personal computer, internet, cellphones, camcorders, VCR, DVD, etc. etc. etc.

WARNING - There is a fist-fight at the bus stop. It really is not much of a fight and no one is injured but if you are very sensitive to physical violence, you might want to skip it. If you want to read up to that point, stop at "August 1968". Also, the words "queer" and "homo" are used, because they were the words used at that time.

**************************************************

Part 2

September 1965

We started the new school year, last week. So far, it doesn't seem any different. There are a few new kids. One boy named Mark, has really pretty blue eyes and light brown hair with bangs that curl a little bit on the end. His hair is so pretty and looks so soft. I told that to Mama and she looked at me kinda strange and didn't say anything. What's wrong with that? It's just the truth. There is a girl named Theresa. She is so pretty it hurts to look at her. Blonde hair the color of honey and beautiful blue-green eyes. I'd give anything to look like her. Sigh.

I have been taking accordion lessons almost 3 years now and I'm kinda tired of accordion. I want to switch to an electric organ, they have two keyboards and bass pedals and all kinds of switches for different sounds.

I love playing my uncle's when we visit. He was so surprised that I could play it and asked me, "How did you learn to play an organ? ", and asked my parents, "Did you buy an organ?", because he knew we don't have one. Daddy said, "No, we didn't get one, how did you learn to play this?"

I told them it's easy because the right hand does the same as on my accordion, and then I just play the chords with my left hand on the other keyboard instead of pushing chord buttons, same for the bass pedals. Once you get the coordination down it's easy. I've been playing their old Ken Griffin records a lot and I can hear and see in my mind what he's doing, so all I had to do was copy it. If I hear a song once or twice I can play it. They tell me I have a good ear.

I thought Mama and Daddy would get an organ for me when they see I can play my uncle's pretty well but they still won't. They say they don't know if I'll stick with it, since I told them I wanted to quit accordion lessons. I guess almost 3 years on it isn't sticking with it enough. I think changing to organ isn't "not sticking with it", it's just a step up. But they don't. So I have been sneaking into their closet when they're not around and fooling with Daddy's guitar. I think I could learn to play one.

I got a guitar today! It's used, a Harmony Stella and cost $15. Mama took me to the music store in town and they are letting me make payments on it. I can't believe I convinced Mama and Daddy to let me do this. I have to pay it off in 90 days and they told me when it's paid off they'll allow me my full price as trade-in on a better one. Mama had to sign something. I'm paying for it with the money I make sweeping out Daddy's cabinet shop. Daddy gave me an old guitar chord book he had and I've been learning some of them. Some of them really sound like crap.

While I was in their closet messing with Daddy's guitar I found a box of old stuff. It's full of old pictures and papers. I didn't know Daddy wrote a story. I found a story he wrote about when he was in the Navy in World War II. I didn't read all of it but I saw on one page where he wrote, "as we crossed the river, my heart sank". What, did the boat spring a leak?

October 1965

I get to play my guitar in the chorus in school. I told our music teacher I was learning to play guitar and she told me to bring it, so I did. I'm going to play chords while the chorus sings a couple songs. Then I sing with the chorus on the rest of them. We are practicing for a concert, all the kids and parents will be there. I can't wait.

Halloween is coming up. Every year I don't know what to be for Halloween. Every Halloween I think of dressing as a girl but don't have the nerve. It's just too close to what I really want, I'm afraid it will show and they'll know. That, and it bugs me that I should only have one day a year where I could maybe get away with it. It still wouldn't really change anything, either. But it would be nice to look right, for even just one day.

November 1965

We did the school show, I played my guitar and it all came out fine. Then after the songs I played, another kid played his guitar on one and the chorus sang with him, including me in the chorus.

I had not heard him play before and didn't even know he played guitar. I still don't know how all of a sudden he's playing guitar to this song, that every practice we've had up to now, there was no guitar. That's really strange. And to top it off, he had a real nice electric guitar and amplifier, and he played and sounded so much better than me. For a couple of days I felt so stupid and like I wanted to quit and forget the guitar. I could tell he's been taking lessons. I got over it, but I'd still like to know how he came to play at the show and was never in our school practices.

My sister has been bugging and bugging and bugging Daddy and Mama for a horse. I can't believe it but they got her one. I guess I just didn't bug them enough about an electronic organ. Oh well.

She's a mare, 3/4 Quarter Horse and 1/4 Thoroughbred. She sure is fast! I don't know why they didn't buy a saddle too but they said we'll get it later so for now we're riding her bareback. She's my sister's but I get to ride her too sometimes.

The first time I got her to trot I thought I was going to sail right off of her, then I figured out how to hold on with my legs. Galloping is really neat, lots smoother and you really feel like you're flying.

In school, when I have spare time, I draw pictures of horses in a field, a wooden fence around it with a red barn to the side and rolling green hills in the background. That's what I want someday.

January 1966

I paid off my $15 guitar and on the day we went to the store to make the last payment, I traded it back to them for a better one. They gave me my full $15 for trade-in, just as they said they would.

The one I got cost $30 and is an archtop, and a Harmony again. It has f-holes and sounds and plays much better than the other one. The other one had strings too high off the neck and was hard to play. They said they'll give me the same deal with this one, I pay it off in 90 days and they'll give me my $30 I paid for it, for trade-in on a better one whenever I want to do that. They're really nice.

I saw an electric guitar there with a solid body, a Fender. It was my favorite color, powder blue. I loved it but no way could I afford it. It cost $400. It might as well be a million. But I'm going to have one like that someday.

May 1966

I'm making model cars and airplanes, little plastic ones from kits. I guess it's a boyish thing to do but since I can't do girl things I might as well do something. I'm not real interested in the cars, I like the airplanes better.

Sometimes friends of Daddy or Mama come over and they bring their kids. If it's a boy anywhere close to my age they always have to come and see my room and their idea of playing is to take my model cars and smash them together. I hate that and not sure what I want to do more, scream and yell or cry. Yelling is less embarrassing. They never get why I don't like smashing my cars. Why are boys so stupid.

I've been crying a lot lately. Daddy looks at me like I'm crazy but I can't help it. When they get mad at me for something or disagree with me on anything, I just burst into tears and run into my room, shut the door, throw myself on my bed and bawl. My sister never cries. I don't know how she can just take things in stride so well and why I'm so much more emotional.

My room is neat all the time and hers always looks like a bomb hit it. I don't get it. I love girly things and know I'm a girl inside, just something went wrong and I got stuck with this dumb boy body. She has a girl body and hates dresses, only wears one if Mama makes her. She doesn't like dolls, or for Mama to make her hair pretty, or anything girly. Maybe we got the wrong bodies, or brains. I wonder if she's like me but backwards? I mean, what if she really doesn't like being a girl? That would be something. I don't dare to say anything about it.

June 1966

I have seen several of the girls at school carrying library books about horses. I asked one about hers and she told me it was by Walter Farley and there's a whole series of them. The Black Stallion is the first one, then there's The Black Stallion Returns, and a whole bunch more. I like horses too, we even have one, so I found The Black Stallion in the school library and read it and have been reading all the sequels when I can find them. They're pretty good and in a way it's kinda nice that this is one "girl thing" that it seems like I can get away with. I'm sure it would be OK for boys to read them too, so I feel safe to be seen with them. Even though I haven't seen any boys at school reading them.

July 1966

I found a box full of Daddy's old magazines in the storeroom in the cabinet shop. Daddy doesn't know I like to nose around in-between cleaning. At least I think he doesn't know. It's okay anyway, because I don't get paid by the hour so I can play around and take as long as I want.

Anyway, he puts the finished cabinets in the storeroom to wait until time for delivery and also there's lots of other stuff stored back there. I was poking around and found a box full of old Popular Electronics and Electronics Illustrated magazines from the Fifties.

I sat down to look through them and I like them. I don't know anything about electronics but maybe I'll try to learn. The Popular Electronics have a regular story in them, called Carl and Jerry. They're two teenage boys and they're super smart and know everything about electronic stuff and solve interesting electronics problems and other mysteries. They sure are not like any boys I've ever met so far. They are also Ham Radio Operators. I think that sounds really neat, I want to find out more about that.

February 1967

At school today the boys laughed at me when we played baseball and said I threw like a girl. Then they said things like "Look, I think he's going to cry now! What a homo!" I was not crying! I don't know what a homo is either but I'm sure it wasn't meant as a compliment. I'll ask Mama sometime. The worst part is not that they laughed at me. It's that I really was trying to throw like the boys do. Even when I try, I can't be like the boys.

I still don't have a clue what homo means. A couple other boys have started calling me Filly. I don't know if it's because Fil sounds a little like the first part of my last name, so they make it Filly and maybe they don't mean anything by it, or if they say it because they know a Filly is a young female horse, so it's a way to make a word play on my name and call me a girl in a way. Maybe they don't even know what a Filly is. Some call me Jamie, making my first name into a girlish version. Actually I sorta like that except when there's a mean intention behind it.

April 1967

Some of the girls at school are starting to get breasts and curvy figures. I love their hair, especially when it's long. Sometimes they'll have a cute barrett in it. Their long eyelashes, pretty dresses in light colors, or skirts and pretty tops. Even their shoes are feminine. Smooth skin with no hairs. Small, beautiful hands with long, delicate fingers. Sigh. I look at them and my heart just aches. Everything they are, I should be too.

When I picture myself in my mind, that's what I see. When I imagine myself speaking, I hear a girl's voice, with girlish up and down pitches, not the dull monotone boys talk with. They look so pretty and I envy them so much. What is wrong with me? If I'm really a boy, why do I feel this way?

Am I crazy? I'm not a bad person. I'm not mean to people, I don't lie to them or try to hurt anyone. But I hate the "me" that is on the outside, and the "me" that I have to be. I wish I knew why I'm like this.

May 1967

We have a new family on our street, down the road. For now, they put a trailer on their land while their house is being built. Their land is covered with blueberry bushes. We used to go pick them and bring them home and give them to Mama to put in pies, biscuits, pancakes and stuff, before they bought the lot and moved there.

They have a son my age named Bruce and a daughter named Bonnie, who is about my sister's age. Bonnie is a little weird but Bruce seems nice, I go over and he invites me into the trailer, his parents are always at work or somewhere, and we have hot chocolate and watch TV a while, then go outside and find something to do. He has real light blond hair a little bit long, blue eyes and is good-looking.

He has an expensive Crossman BB gun, powered by a CO2 cartridge. It looks just like a Winchester. I have a Daisy I got for my birthday a couple years ago. Bruce said "Let's go hunting for birds". I like birds, I don't want to hurt them, but my BB gun is so weak, you can see the BB dropping to the ground when you shoot it, and my eyes are not good either so I said, "OK", because I know I won't actually hit anything and Bruce is the only other kid on my street and I don't want to lose him as a friend.

We walk through the woods and Bruce is so serious. He says, "SHHH! There's some up in those trees over there! See them?" I never see them but I say, "Yes!" He shoots at whatever and I really don't know if he hits anything, I hope not. I shoot at the tree at nothing. I just like being with someone, walking around in the woods.

The woods here are beautiful. Thick with vine maple trees. Sometimes I even climb up in the trees, tangle a bunch of the thin branches together and can lay down up there. There's a lot of brush and brambles and sometimes you can't get through some areas and have to go around.

There's lots of wild blackberry bushes, and a few old rotten stumps of big trees that were cut years ago. The stumps often have wild huckleberries bushes growing up from them. You can walk around and just pick berries and eat them right off the bushes.

There are wild flowers all over. I don't know the names of most of them except one, I picked some and gave them to Mama and Daddy said they were called Bleeding Hearts. They're really pretty.

There's a little pond too with a log floating in it, which is a little like a canoe, there's a long pole there and you can pole it around the pond but it's kindof hard to stay on it. There's a little raft too that someone made but you get wet feet on it. I try not to get wet feet but do anyway. Daddy somehow found out about the pond and told me not to play there but I still do.

June 1967

No more hunting. I was outside with my BB gun and saw a bird on the power-lines. I shot at it and hit it. I never expected that. It dropped to the ground a few yards in front of me with a plop and didn't move. I looked at it in shock and I felt so terrible. I went home, threw my BB gun in the corner and myself on my bed face down and cried. Quietly so no one would hear. I'm never going "hunting" with Bruce again, or shooting at any more birds.

May 1968

I'm almost 13 now. I've pretty much given up hope that I'm ever going to turn into a girl or have a doctor find out I'm a girl inside. I guess that was a stupid thing to believe but then I was younger.

I am trying to accept and believe that I am a boy and this "I'm a girl inside" thing is just a crazy childish notion and it will fade away. Even if it goes away, does it mean I have something wrong with my brain to have ever felt that way? What if it never goes away?

It's not like I'm constantly thinking about it. I can go for days and it won't enter my mind. But it always comes to mind sooner or later. Something always happens to remind me.

Daddy has told me that I'm old enough to start calling him "Dad" instead of Daddy. It made me feel ashamed. Somehow I can't call him Dad, to me he's Daddy. It's like that's his name, it's who he is. "Dad" just sounds strange to me.

I think he's a little bit disgusted by me. Or at least disappointed. He has never said anything to me directly about it or been mean to me, and I have never said anything to him that I remember, not since that day when I said, "I like female better", and I've never said anything to my mother either since asking about being a Tom-girl a while back, but I'll bet they know something's not quite right about me.

I know I'm not the son he wants and never will be. A lot of times when he's working on something, he tells me to go get him some tool and I never know what he wants. He told me to bring him a medium Phillips screwdriver. I didn't know what a Phillips screwdriver was so I looked at them all in his toolbox and took him one. Of course it wasn't a Phillips. He got mad at me and said, "Don't you even know what a Phillips screwdriver is?" I told him I didn't remember him ever telling me. The same thing happens with other tools. How would I know what a Phillips screwdriver is, or an open-end wrench from a box wrench or whatever, if someone doesn't tell me? It's not like I read books about tools. Maybe I'm just supposed to know this stuff. It's never been interesting to me.

I wonder if they know or suspect what it actually is with me. I bet even if they know or think they know, they couldn't bring themselves to talk about it.

Maybe they think I'm queer.

I finally asked my mother what queer and homo meant and she told me. She even told me how queer boys do it and I couldn't believe it, yuck. I never even imagined such a thing.

Daddy had the talk with me about sex not long ago too. He told me that the man puts his ... penis... I don't even like to say the word, it's just icky... into the woman's vagina... ewwww! I never imagined that, either. Maybe I'll never have sex no way because right now the thought of it queer or non-queer, makes me want to barf.

July 1968

Bruce calls me queer now, more than any of the rest of them. Every day at the bus stop and on the bus, if I have to sit anywhere near enough to see him and hear him, I hear that. He was my friend. Now he hates me and is always picking on me, and he's spreading it to any kid in the area he can get to go along with it. One of the other boys I was kinda friends with is now his best friend and they both hate me and pick on me and call me queer and homo. Along with a couple girls who use our same bus stop.

It's my own fault. I saw my mother's eyebrow pencil and mascara thingy in the bathroom. She doesn't have a vanity in her and Daddy's room like lots of women do. Funny, considering she's married to a cabinetmaker. Her makeup is inside the mirror in the bathroom cabinet. I found it. I couldn't resist and put a little eyebrow pencil on my brows and some mascara on my lashes. I thought no one would notice. Big mistake.

One of the girls on the bus in the morning spotted it and yelled it to the whole bus. "LOOK, HE'S GOT MASCARA! HE'S WEARING MASCARA, HAHAHAHA!!!!" That pretty much did it. Of course I didn't think and wiped my eyes on my sleeve which only proved that she was right. After that I was homo and queer. I didn't tell Mama about that and I don't know if she ever noticed anything about the mascara, she never said anything.

I don't know if she'd say anything about it or just try and forget it, if she did notice. When she asked why I wanted to know what homo and queer meant I told her I heard some boys saying it. I didn't tell her that it was me, who they were calling queer and homo.

Even though I don't believe they're right, it still hurts. I've never done anything to them. Why can't they just leave me alone.

August 1968

I got into my first real fist-fight today. On the way to school, Bruce said he was going to beat me up after school at the bus stop and I'd better not try and get out of it. His little group looked at me and were delighted. Their hate for me, when I've never done anything to them, makes me feel so small and worthless.

There's no way I could get out of fighting him, since we both ride the same bus and get off and on at the same stop.

I was really scared. He is known as one of the cool, tough kids, stocky and muscular and I'm a skinny girly wimp with arms and legs like toothpicks. I believed same as everyone else, that I was going to get beaten up bad but I couldn't see any way to avoid it any longer and figured I might as well get it over with.

I told him, "Fine, but you be there alone, no audience". I didn't want a crowd of other kids to see me get beaten up, or especially for any other boys to gang up with him against me.

After we got off the bus, no one else was there but Bruce. I didn't expect that but I was glad. We walked a little way from the main road and Bruce said, "OK, you ready?" I said, "Yes". He took off his coat. I left mine on because I hoped it would help pad his punches if he hit me on my body, so they wouldn't hurt so much. I realize now that was a dumb thought.

He put his arms up in front of him with his fists out, so I did too, in what I thought would be the best defence. I was just guessing. I was kindof wishing now that I'd learned how to fight. I never enjoyed play fighting with boys or even my Daddy so never did it and don't know the first thing about fighting. All I know is, I don't want to get hit.

He swung at my jaw, I saw it coming and moved my arm a little to block it. He swung again and I blocked it again. He tried a few more times with both right and left, and I blocked them easily. I seem to have very quick reflexes. I was so surprised and relieved, I started to giggle. The look on his face was one I'll never forget. He was shocked. Being blocked and giggled at by a "skinny, girly, homo wimp" as he considers me, who he was no doubt expecting to be cowering in fear and crying like a baby by now, was surely not what he expected. He couldn't hit me. I blocked every single one of his punches. I was pretty shocked, myself.

By then I thought, well, I guess I should not just block but try and hit him too, since here we are, fighting and all. So I threw a few punches at him and actually hit him a few times. That surprised him and me both, again. I'm sure my punches didn't hit very hard, I didn't put a lot into them. I didn't even think of really trying to hurt him. I just don't feel like that, even after the rotten way he's been to me. I'm betting my wimpy punches still didn't feel very good though, and I got through, he couldn't.

I don't even remember how it happened now. Somehow he ended up on the ground on his back, on the side of the road, and I had him by the front of his shirt in my left hand. I was bent over him with my right fist up, ready to punch him, but hesitated because, believe it or not, I didn't really want to. At that moment he said, "Had enough?" Is he kidding? He's on the ground on his back and he asks if I've had enough? Rather than press that point, I said to him, "Have YOU?", and he said, "Yes". I let go of him and let him get up. Then he said, "You're a good fighter". I said, "So are you", and it was over. He went on to his house, and I went to mine.

I walked home relieved, and amazed. I'd feared him and taken his calling me homo and queer, for so long, and fighting him was this easy? Maybe I was just lucky, or had help from "someone up there". I don't know, but am thankful it turned out this way.

I expected that with the way the fight ended with him on the ground, that it was clear that I won the fight fair and square and he knew it. I expected that he'd leave me alone now, maybe even have a little respect for me.

The next day at the bus stop, the other kids in their little group were asking Bruce, "So what happened? Did you beat him up?" I always stand off by myself, away from them but I heard them ask and then I heard him telling them he beat me up! I couldn't believe it. I turned and gave them a long stare so they could see I had no bruises or anything, then I looked away again. I didn't hear them say much after that. I hope they got a good look at me and thought, "He sure doesn't look like he got beat up", and doubt Bruce's story.

The good news is, so far, Bruce hasn't bothered me much since then. Mostly just dirty looks and muttered insults, which are not a big deal to me. So maybe I did gain just a little respect.

I'm not afraid of him anymore, but I'd rather he was still my friend.

How It Was - Part 1