Baby Teeth

The first cut, as they say, is the deepest

I couldn’t sleep last night. Every drunk yelling under the window finally slipped away by 3AM and left the street silent.

My beloved was deep in slumber, a fort of pillows protecting his right flank. I curled up on my lover’s other side and woke him up.

1959, Oakland

“Jon, tell me a story,” I said, “you know, a really personal story.”

It’s a little joke. If he speaks to me in confession, I will fall into a dead slumber. The more secret the story, the sooner I’ll drift off.

I thought of a question to get him started. “When you were a little boy, what was the first time you can remember getting hurt?”

Jon remembered a spill. He took a fall in the public commons of a housing project in State College, Pennsylvania. He was running— tripped and scraped his knee on the edge of a slate staircase. He remembered the blood pouring out of his knee, the shock of all that red ink. His mother came running out, bundled him up, wiped his tears. I always wanted to be bundled like that.

I fell asleep dreaming of a mommy’s blanket.

I remember the first time I got hurt; I was bit by a little girl. I was in daycare. My mother was working as a secretary and we were living in Berkeley after my parents’ divorce.

The nursery rooms were large, cold— in my memories they looked like a set from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. When the teachers grew impatient, they rolled out wooden moveable walls, seven-foot high, narrow dark panels, which they wheeled into position and could trap a toddle in a box, anywhere on the floor.

You could see light at the top of the panels, as they only moving walls, but otherwise it was like being stuck in a trunk. You laid on the floor inside your “box” and they told you not to make a sound or it would get worse.

Outside the classroom area, there was an asphalt yard. One afternoon a little girl with raven curls and blue eyes— I remember how pretty she was— even at two that made an impression. She came up to me, grabbed my forearm like a sandwich, and sank her teeth in.

I have no idea why. I yelled bloody murder; I saw the marks and red holes well up on my skin. Someone— not our mothers— rushed over and punished both of us. We were walled up in separate boxes.

I had complained about the walled box to my mother with no effect before. But this time, there was no hiding the injury. I remember her outrage— and her impulse. Elizabeth jumped into the car and I sat at home watching the kitchen clock imagining the tongue-thrashing she was going to give them. I never had to go back there again. When she came home, she was grim but I could tell it was over.

There’s never any misunderstanding about broken skin. No “what if?” or “should I care?” We yell or cry out, hit or block; there’s no wondering how we feel.

When I first started teaching about sex, in my thirties, I tried to whittle down what it was that people viscerally react to, when sex horrifies them. I kept coming back to our openings, the expected and unexpected openings to the body. We don’t like invasions we didn’t ask for.

I did an exercise with a classroom of mine, students analyzing sexual representation. I said, “Let’s try to get to the nitty-gritty of what is called offensive. Let’s stop talking about it.” I gave them all crayons and butcher paper, reminiscent of a daycare.

“I want you to quickly sketch the most disgusting thing you can think of, the thing you are repulsed by, that you cannot endure for one second.”

I told them I didn’t care if it was phobic, or irrational, or whether everyone would agree with their choice. Just go for it.

I asked them to draw two pictures. One that depicted an “offensive” situation that was not about sex. Another one, that was pointedly sexual.

We pinned the drawings to the wall. It was a parade of horrors and silly’s. It was hard to stop laughing or gasping. Of course, most of the students were not adept draftsmen; everyone’s pictures was crude. I only gave them a few minutes.

The nonsexual themes of offense evoked brutal violence, the monster vs. the mouse. Images of people hurting children, or animals, or each other in a vast war. The red crayon was used to draw the cuts, the explosions, the cruelty. The world split open. Faces with blue tears pouring out of their eyes. Anyone can draw that.

The sexual offenses were sometimes fetishistic, and other times universal. Many students went to shit. One student drew an ice cube tray of “shit-sicles”— god, how did he ever think of that? There were the bugaboos of the youthful and sexually-inexperienced: Anal sex, ew. Oral sex, ugh. One young man drew a dripping snatch, the horror! Another drew a penis that wouldn't stop ejaculating, choking its recipient. Gang rape was represented. One young woman drew the aftermath line of an abortion. Her belly and vagina cut open. Someone drew a penis forced into another’s ear.

The themes of bullying and powerlessness unified us. But the sexual confessions were more surreal. They were unusual . . . or symbolic. The students knew that their fears were unlikely to come true, they were exaggerated— but the horror persisted.

I kept saying, “Look at the openings. The place where we say, ‘I can push out, but you can’t push in.’”

We take pleasure and relief in those same openings, but there’s no ignoring their perilous entry. We don’t want to be caught off guard. Our nose, ears, eyes, mouth, vagina. Anuses. We arrive bundled up, and we don’t want any poking. We work up the courage to invite another’s touch.

I didn’t want to get bit by that pretty little girl at daycare. She reminded me of Rose Red. I was Snow White. I was smitten with her perfect valentine of a face and sapphire eyes. I thought she was coming to me with a wreath of flowers instead of incisors.

So my early desire was nipped. I wanted to smell, to listen, to taste, to be felt . . . with discrimination.

Would I have learned anything, without being hurt? I was hurt too much, like most of us. But not by incoherent two-year-olds. More by the wall-boxers. There was way too many of them.

I was bullied as a kid because I was intellectually precocious and socially immature. I read constantly, but I had my thumb in my mouth half the time. My moral universe was populated with fairy tales my mother read me, opera librettos, and folk songs she’d sing— I had no idea what kids were talking about down the street. I wore thick glasses at a time when you didn’t see many children with prescription lenses. My shoes were funny and my hand-sewn dress hems fell below my knees. I attended ten schools before I was 17 and had a vocabulary that didn't sound like it came from anywhere nearby, because we never were.

My mother and I moved every year or two, our belongings stuffed in a 1963 VW Bug. When Elizabeth got fed up with something, she cleared out. There was no doubting the injustice that propelled her.

One year she was teaching English at a local high school in Contra Costa County, the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay Area. It was Christmastime and she decorated her classroom with a few UNICEF cards, National-Geographic-style photographs of people celebrating winter season holidays all over the world. I remember urging her to put the Diwali one in the best-lit corner, because I loved the photograph of the Indian girls surrounded with candles, bangles sparkling on their arms.

Elizabeth had costume jewelry pins to wear for all the holidays; I loved helping her clasp them to her Jackie Kennedy-style shifts. She was so slim she could carry them off like a model. For Diwali, she wore some of her blue and gold glass bangles from her early married days living in Bangalore with my father.

The vice principal came in the classroom the first afternoon of Diwali— I wonder, who tipped him off about a Hindi holiday?

“He told me to take the cards down,” Elizabeth said, ‘he said, ‘this instant’— and UNICEF was a front for the Communist Party and would not be tolerated at Amador High.” She laughed, as if Communist Party members would take an interest in a rural spur of California that was about to change from walnut groves to suburban tract homes.

“What did you say, Mommy; what does that mean?”

Elizabeth dragged in some empty plastic milk cartons from the car to load our records and books. She had already made the decision to move. “I told him he was an idiot.”

I didn’t get explicit political rhetoric in our house. It was all inferred. I had no idea what communism was, or what its opposite might be. Hating winter solstice?

What I understood is that there were bullies everywhere, and you coped with them by giving them a piece of your mind and then turning your back on them forever. Did the silent treatment teach them a lesson? I was never there long enough to find out.

After 1965, I knew the drill. I lifted my most beloved possession, our 15” black and white Zenith, into the front seat, tucked under my feet. I couldn’t wait to get to our next destination and plug it in. From Contra Costa County, we moved to Riverside County, in the tumbleweeds. Then the San Gabriel Valley mountains. Up to the Bay Area, back down to Los Angeles. There was a tiny hole in the VW’s running boards where you could see the road rushing underneath us, like water. I daydreamed that if I was small enough, I could slip right through.

I was thrilled when my mother turned her sword of indignation on others, but I was afraid to be alone with her. She’d get in moods. I didn’t see them coming when I was small, but by the time I was six, I learning. Sometimes she’d ambush me in the night, storming out into the living room where I slept on the sofa and throwing a bucket of dishwater on my snoring body. An excellent cure for snoring. Or she’d turn on me in the kitchen with a wooden spoon or her hand across my face. I was “an idiot,” too. Then she’d cry and say she was sorry. She wanted me to hold her tight. She couldn’t help that she wished me dead along with everyone else who was tormenting her.

The Boy’s Dean at Amador High School got off light, in my estimation.

As I became older, I wished Elizabeth would leave me behind. Finally, she did. The bite is quite lasting, isn’t it? I only now can look at some of my memories, the ones I don’t have a photograph to prompt, and see all the little marks come together.

---

Chapter 1, Big Sex Little Death

---