How boys play

Smashing things up

The fifth of five boys, I was high-tonic from birth: rigid, hard, clenched, almost spastic, not all the way into cerebral palsy, but a toe walker, yes, as if a punch might land on me at any second. Recently I had a second neck surgery and my doc said, “You’re straight-backed.” How so? He presumed my offense: “It’s not your fault”— which guaranteed my offense. But, he meant not curved. He said, “Right, most people have an S, just a nice S. And you’re almost straight.” Anyway, surgery went okay. I’ve had carpentry on my neck, nose, knees, and toes. My hands may need it now, if surgery can still bring relief, but I’m not there yet.

Being a certain kind of boy impelled it. From my earliest yawny days in a school desk, smelling leaf smoke outside, I wanted out of it, to blast across classmates’ heads, bank off the chalkboard tray, and parkour out the window. Not till age ten did I run across the school rooftop, roll on the ground, and keep moving. My brother and I evaded Pinkertons. But stuck in my desk, I made guns of pencils, stared past the yellow barrel pointed up the teacher’s nostril, sighed, and cracked the books. Classrooms posed physics and acceleration problems to me, with sprinkled spelling tests, cool stories, and rodent observations.

When sports gave me vent to smash others besides my older brothers, my buddies and I played snow football with dented empty soda cans on the way to school, falling in slow motion to our own play-by-play. Front yard football left me with awesome green and blue-sprained thumbs and fingers. Splitting my chin to the bone on ice makes it hard to shave without slicing the scar to this day. Cool.

A certain kind of boy grows up with body memory of eluding touches and tackles on the green, and Gretzky-like stick handling on the ice. I spent hours each day studying baseball trajectories across the sky in order to vacuum them into my glove. Running backs call the moves jukes, but we called it dekes. Same thing. You had the speed or you didn’t. From hockey, I bear loose knobs on my elbows. I have four scars around my head.

This boy scrambled bikes barefoot on a stingray using a handle grip to be thrown into spokes for tag, fell from broken branches, dove into a swimming hole quarry, and gashed my head on the bottom, and rolled a tractor tire into traffic at night. We needed electric fun to beat the boredom of the early seventies.

When I hear about no sex differences from people who’ve never studied data sets, I want to see scars, and say shut up if you don’t have ’em. I have a little one above my knee from a puncture. In eighth grade I ran down a deep six-story ravine and flipped to see my body react. Some root hit my thigh and swoll it up. The bandage tapes shielded the sun and etched an American flag red, white, and blue. At age 14, tiptoeing past a boat prow, I slipped and impaled its broken antenna into my inner thigh next to my balls, felt like it stabbed my sphincter. That fucking hurt.

Along a data set, there are differences. A chunk of boys parkour, and smash ourselves up. Some girls do, too. Or they skate. I didn’t really know them. I guess too bad for me.