I watched in horror as my three-year old danced along with the homosexual purple dinosaur. Barney galloped and sang about "houses of all kinds" with a group of children much too old to be involved with such a spectacle- sort of a modern day Mickey Mouse Club. Just as I was contemplating the possibility of Barney being the anti-Christ or the Beast or some other creature foretold in Revelation, the group stopped their crooning and went into soliloquies celebrating their diverse living arrangements. An ugly Asian kid proclaimed "I live in a house." "I live in an apartment," said a black child with a lisp. Finally, an Anglo girl chimed in with "I live in a house AND an apartment- one with my Mom and one with my Dad." (Note to makers of Barney: if diversity is truly what you are shooting for, you left out the buck-toothed white kid with overalls that lives in the double-wide trailer down in Chickasaw Junction.)

Thank God this isn't how it would happen in real life. No kid that lives in a crappy apartment while his peers have houses would proudly declare it to the group, especially at the awkward adolescent age that these kids were suffering through. He'd be much too ashamed of his lowly lot in life. Most likely, the rich kid with the traditional family and the house wouldn't be speaking out, either. Years of intimidation and abuse by the spawns of crackheads, Ridalin-taking ragamuffins, and latch-key lechers would leave him withdrawn and sullen in such sordid company. The girl would be so wracked with guilt and so self-conscious about her father abandoning her that she would never admit to it in front of others. In fact, in the unlikely event that such a group of kids were somehow thrown together, they wouldn't be talking about where they live or who their parents are- much less dancing with a purple-suited prehistoric pervert. Quite likely, however, at least one of them would be singled out for abuse by the others. Thank God, you say? Yes. Thank God. Thank God for the abuse inflicted upon each of us by our peers in those formative years.

Let me explain. You see, when I was ten years old I still proudly wore a shirt that said 'Tuscaloosa-Where the Action Is'. Tuscaloosa? Action? When I moved to Mississippi at that tender young age I honestly wanted other kids to inquire about the shirt and its obscure caption. I wanted them think "that kid's from Tuscaloosa? He must be cool. Say, isn't that where the University of Alabama is? The Crimson Tide! I bet that kid even saw Bear Bryant- maybe even knows him…" and so on. Fortunately this wasn't how the kids in Mississippi took it. My brother often recounts a watershed event in his life in which he wound up to tell a story about the glories of Sweet Home Alabama only to be stopped short by an irate fifth grade classmate. "-I know, Van! Everybody in the school knows you're from TUSCALOOSA, Alabama!" The full measure of my brother's shame weighed him down like a millstone tied around his neck. Only then did he understand and begin to repent of his ways.

For years my face burned in bed at night as I recounted some of my adolescent learnings. Once, out of pity for my Mom, I accepted a pair of shoes from her that were not in keeping with contemporary Junior High fashion (my brother- at this point adorning a green tooth because of a botched repair job and perhaps still feeling the sting of my Mother's previous attempt to make us cool by getting us Rod Stewart "punk" haircuts at the start of seventh grade- wisely rejected the shoes in favor of Nikes). I remember stepping off the bus that morning with the reflective white canvass shoes on, wishing I could make my feet turn invisible. I could feel the eyes weighing heavy on the side of my shoes. In place of a Nike swoosh or three Adidas stripes, there was a "beach scene" that looked like the rising sun on a package of Cornflakes. I felt safe for a moment as I huddled with my group of rejects in the school parking lot. My best friend then asked what the hell was on my shoes. A farm? In gym class the coach even got in on the act. "Hey Wurm, where'd you get those shoes?" He said with a huge smile. Thankfully, the black kids were particularly ruthless. They made gym class a living hell for me and my farmer shoes. "Cock-a-doodle-doooo," a group said in unison then fell onto the gym floor with laughter. I struggled through the rest of the week by cramming my feet under my desk or bus seat whenever possible, but in the end I had to ask my Mom for some Nikes.

Oh, I did my share of helping other kids too. On Halloween in fourth grade this kid made the mistake of wearing an inflatable Halloween costume to school that was better suited for a seven-year old. On the walk home from school, a group of us was so determined to help the guy improve his social acumen that we surrounded him like a pack of hyenas and used the inflatable "Martian" head as a punching bag. He learned more that day than he had all year. Later, my friends and I were able to apply what we had learned in Junior High to help others with mild or severe social abnormalities as well. At one point our new friend Ed was so socially and physically inept that it took severe physical and mental abuse to correct his problems. One day three of us took it upon ourselves to improve him. After hours of verbal and physical torture, Ed lay on the ground in a state of learned helplessness, his tears watering the pavement. Even this did not cure him, so a larger group of us threw Ed into a pit and cleansed him with saliva and verbal assaults. The kid took on a whole different perspective. Once Ed had been sufficiently improved, he joined us in applying the same techniques, only in larger measures, to other misfits in our neighborhood, even going so far as surrounding a kid's house and pushing him to the brink of homicide. After a couple of years of systematic torment the kid was more normal.

In high school the rules changed by degree and kind. My brother and I woke up one hour early on our first day of 10^th grade and walked a mile and a half to a friend's house to wait for the bus along with several others. We had banded together that lethargic August morning in hopes of softening the blow of being the only high-school-aged bus riders in our white middle class neighborhood. It was not to be. Our nervous laughter and horseplay was muted as the bus rounded the corner and struggled to top the hill where we stood. I looked for hope in the eyes of my peers as we boarded bus 84-98 just like the first graders had done an hour before. There was none. Inside, the bus was so silent that one could have heard a tear drop. Further inside- inside my soul- I cursed the day of my birth. My heart was in my throat as the bus pulled in front of the school and lumbered its way into the parking lot of Clinton High. I looked straight ahead, but I could see the figures and shadows of the normal white kids as they listened to music in their cars or sat on the tailgates of their four wheel drives with the other kids whose parents had provided them with a means of self-locomotion. The whole thing had a dream-like quality. I braced myself for the weight of leering, scornful eyes as the bus stopped and we began to unload, but there was none. The courtyard where we were dropped off was filled with blacks and poor whites- the lint of the social fabric. Some of the characters that leaned on the walls and milled about in the courtyard that morning had been terrors in grammar school and junior high- possessing the power to shape our actions and inflict abuse- but all of that had changed. They were powerless now- nullified by the physical space of twenty yards that separated them from the cool kids in hand-me-down cars and an impassable social gulf as tangible as the border with Mexico. We were untouchables that didn't need to ring a bell to warn others of our uncleanness. To be sure, the abuse that came with high school was not as overt as that experienced in earlier years, but it was a thousand times more powerful since only a select few could wield it. And the lessons learned would last everyone a lifetime. We knew that we had to achieve so that we wouldn't suffer a similar fate later in life and so that our offspring would have a chance to be normal.

The beautiful thing about the sort of abuse that had evolved by the high school years was that one didn't even have to try to inflict it. Indeed, it was so passive in nature that it was inflicted by default. It was a thing of state and position. It was "unspoken" (for those of you who have ears, let them listen). Fortunately for me, I only had to suffer the abuse for the better part of my first year at CHS. When I finally got a car in April of that year, it was good enough to promote me directly from the leper-filled courtyard to a side parking lot where the thespians, band fags, smart kids, and other middle class geeky white kids hung out. I no longer had to endure the angst brought about by the morning bus rides.

Best of all, it came my time to be on the giving end of the abuse rather than receiving. I think back to a time when I gave one of our star football players a ride home from a big game as an example. The guy had hurt his leg so badly that he had to be helped into the car. We spoke very little as we drove the two miles to the other side of town where he and most of the other blacks lived. We drove on narrow, pot-hole-filled roads and passed rows of randomly placed small but neatly kept houses until we came to what appeared to be a dead end. A driveway, almost entirely obscured by trees and undergrowth, was off to one side. The guy asked me to stop the car and let him out. I thought it was odd, but obliged. When I saw that he was having trouble walking down the road toward the driveway, I pulled the car alongside him and offered to help. To my surprise he refused. Reasoning that he just did not relish the thought of physical contact with a skinny white boy, I offered to drive him right up to his doorstep. He refused even more adamantly. As I drove away I realized that the guy just didn't want me to see the pathetic shack that he lived in. I was the abuser. And man was I proud.