“I just felt like I had to push you a bit,” is my mother’s response whenever we talk about my teenage years.īeginning around adolescence, I began to form a secret life that included a fascination with archeology and detective stories and vampires. Even to this day, she likes to tell my wife that I was a fearful boy who never did like climbing trees. Around the time of my bar mitzvah she put me on a variety of diets, each one of which focused my attention ever increasingly on the very body I longed to ignore. Deep down I wondered if I was unlovable, and my cherubic features - the ones that Syd, among others, loved to point out - seemed the nexus of my failure to be hard and lean.Īs my mother saw it, being pudgy was compounded by the sin of over-sensitivity, and she did her best to cure me of both.

I felt singled out for special torment by the mean girls of seventh grade, the ones who wedged their tiny hips into Jordache jeans and whose Farrah Fawcett curls flipped across the their foreheads as they mocked my oily hair and bargain-basement velour tops. Then there was me: the chubby 12-year old who hated gym and anxexile iously counted the days to the dreaded “10 Minute Walk/Run,” a government-mandated health test administered each spring and fall during middle school. I recall as far back as sixth grade, when one new boy managed to win over our class by mounting the monkey bars outside and, ropey muscles bulging, completed several chin-ups in quick succession. Sitting in the theater, I had, without asking, reached into his enormous exactly. On this particular evening, my friend Syd (not his real name) and I had gone to the movies. For reasons I’ve never understood, the wealthier and better educated the suburb, the less appetite there is for difference. It’s not like this had escaped my notice, up. I stared at him with what must’ve been a stupid expression, but it was less the threat and more the truth of what he’d said that stung. “If you weren’t such a wimp, I’d punch you in the face right now,” he said. The normally mild-mannered Syd frowned and threw me a hard look.

It was an impulsive move, even an aggressive one, or maybe it suggested to Syd a level of intimacy we hadn’t achieved.

But latitude is typically not the case in the suburbs especially not so in wealthy, overwhelmingly white ones like the southern Ontario town where I grew enormous bucket of popcorn and extracted a handful. Given this was the early 1980s - an era best remembered (and not without irony) for its androgynous male rock stars - you’d think that some gender latitude might have been in order. Sometime in the middle of high school I was confronted with rather irrefutable evidence that I wasn’t much of a man.

Exile in Guyville by Dave White