Learning to Love Yourself: Amo, Amas, Amat
Day One: September 1979
It’s the first day of high school.
I walk into Latin class. As typical, I sit near the window in the back of the classroom. This location allows me to survey the whole classroom and, hopefully, avoid direct interactions with, well, anyone.
I take a good look at the instructor: a 50-something-year-old guy named George Parker. He is wearing suspenders, large framed glasses, and a bad dye job. I wonder what role he will play in my effort to remake myself as a human being. Or at least, normal.
At this new school, my goal is to construct a new me.
Why a new me?
First, junior high sucked. I had a few friends whom I disdained, and the cool kids I really wanted as friends wanted nothing to do with me. Some of the teachers were kind, but others tolerated me at best. I don’t blame them.
Second, girls didn’t like me and kept their distance. Again, I don’t blame them. I was the shortest kid in my class, with braces and wire-rimmed glasses that made me look like I was an alien. And to complete the visual, my head was shaped like E.T.’s.
Really. People said so. No joke. E.T.
Third and final strike, I played Dungeons and Dragons with my friends the same way the stoners who gathered in the high school parking lot smoked weed – as often as possible.
Accordingly, my self-worth score leaving junior high was around minus 10.
Trying to Achieve Escape Velocity
As I sit at my desk, I have some vague hope that this is my chance to reinvent myself. To turn myself into something other than who I am: a low-status loser who plays D&D to escape the misery of my day-to-day existence.
Somehow, I will master this difficult subject, and start on the road to becoming an intellectual. And then, I can escape to a decent college that is far, far away from here.
It’s not just that I want to increase my social order status amidst the rich, white suburb outside of Boston where I live and have grown up. I want out, completely.
I need to achieve escape velocity from my reality. To get out from under the verbal and physical abuse from my dad.
My dad, you see, is an unpredictable, mean drunk who turns the dinner table into a war zone even when he is sober.
He is now seven years sober, but still has some of the characteristics of what people in recovery call a “dry drunk.” He’s somewhat better. However, I am far from recovered. I can’t just stop drinking from the bottle of my memories. Sure, abusive episodes are less frequent, but the damage has been done.
Memories of an Alcoholic Father
Let me take you down memory lane.
Once, when I was younger, I remember laughing as my dad drunkenly danced in the dining room while we ate. His Vaudeville act was complete with a hat and cane. We laughed, but nervously, fearful that this comedic scene could turn abusive at any moment.
Another time, dad woke up dead-drunk a couple of hours after sundown. It was late Fall and dark outside. He came downstairs to find us hiding in the den eating TV dinners and watching a rerun of Gunsmoke. He growled like a troll, picked up the flimsy folding tables we were eating from, and tried to throw them out the window, splattering food and shards of broken glass everywhere.
But the pièce de résistance was a fear years ago, when a sober dad screamed at my older brother for not believing in the existence of God. He yelled as if the force of his voice and anger alone was going to reconstitute my brother’s faith in a sovereign creator. As Dad screamed, my mother, brother, and I sat quietly like hostages on a hijacked plane, afraid to move or speak.
Day Three: The Self-esteem Decline
After that first day, I was cautiously optimistic. Parker had taught us the eight parts of speech. There was nothing in the material that seemed too impenetrable.
It felt doable, allowing me to entertain the hope that maybe I could become a good student and even something of an intellectual.
However, it is now day three, and I can feel a shift in the energy.
Sure enough, Parker walks over to my desk.
“Dexter, what would you think if I said you had puelline features?” he asks. He didn’t wink, as if it was an inside joke, but instead just stared right at me.
I wince. Just moments before, we had learned puella was the word for “girl” in Latin.
“You’re saying I look like a girl,” I say, nonchalantly. I don’t want him to see that his words hurt me.
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” he responds, “I’d just say that you have feminine features.”
His gaze becomes intense, betraying his curiosity over how I would respond.
My heart starts racing, and my brain goes into damage control. I know this game, and I really don’t like playing it.
Living in Parallel Universes
This, it turns out, was just the beginning. Every day, I leave a home where I exist in a state of constant fear at worst – and malaise existence, at best.
Now, I go through the school day with the same feeling.
Every time I walk into Latin class, I am overcome with vomit-inducing fear.
What will he say or do to me today?
My Latin textbook has become a horror to me. A grimoire – a book of evil spells. I naively thought that if I really buckled down and became proficient at Latin, I would earn Mr. Parker’s respect. But it wasn’t to be.
This constant fear is taking its toll on my concentration and ability to learn. I am now far from escaping the velocity of this evil gravitational pull. I’m cratering.
“You don’t have to come to school for this. You get this at home, don’t you?” Parker says to me, revealing his awareness of the world I inhabit. He must have smelled it on me.
My brain races back to a dinner-table confrontation when I was nine years old. Dad had been sober for two years sober but was still nasty to me. Over the meal, I laid down the law and told him he’d better stop picking on me.
“Or what?” he asked, triumphantly, knowing that I had backed myself into a corner.
“Or I’ll beat your head in,” I threatened, at which point he slapped me hard with his open right hand on the side of my head. Moments later he wept in shame and guilt, telling me he was proud of me for standing up to him.
In psychology, they call this a double bind. In other words, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Getting Help From An Unexpected Source
“You need to tell that guy where to get off!” a student tells me during lunch.
“It’s no big deal,” I reply, amazed anyone is even slightly taking my side.
That night, I tell my family what’s going on in Latin class. I have no choice, as I’m flunking Latin and need to explain. I tell my mom the facts, including that I can’t even open my Latin textbook without getting sick to my stomach.
My mom reacts with sympathy, but also disbelief that any teacher would talk to a student in the way I am describing. Still, she knows I am telling the truth.
Following my dinner table confession, my mom goes next door to talk to our neighbor who is a retired high school English teacher. She knows me pretty well , because I deliver the local newspaper to her house five days a week.
After my mother spoke to our neighbor about my plight, I talk to her myself one day while delivering her paper. She tells me that Parker went to seminary but was never ordained. Currently, he served as president of the teacher’s union, and despite enjoying a certain charisma and popularity, was regarded with disdain by many of his colleagues.
“He’s a weirdo,” she summed up.
Much of this information was not new. However, one thing she told me that was new is the fact that Parker has a reputation for picking on outcasts in his classroom. Apparently, this is an open secret in the school department. He had done it before and everyone knew about it. I wasn’t the first student in town he had singled out for abuse like this.
But, it turns out, I was the last.
Taking a stand for myself
That night, I told my dad about the situation over dinner.
When I shared Parker’s comment about “you get this at home,” my Dad’s eyes flashed with anger; a look I knew only too well. Only, for a change, it wasn’t towards me.
“The next time he says something like that to you, you tell him: ‘Why don’t you stop with the personal comments and teach me Latin,” my dad suggests, with anger in his voice.
“I can’t say that to a teacher,” I reply.
“You’ve learned how to stand up to me,” he says with a mixture of guilt and pride on his face. “Now you’re going to have to stand up to this prick.”
This was a hinge point in our relationship. From then on, I knew my dad was on my side.
Incredibly, the opportunity to follow my Dad’s advice came sooner than I expected.
“Dexter, what would you say if I told you to put your face into a bowl of flour and make monkey face pie?” Parker asks me the next day, as if this is a normal question for a teacher to ask.
Instinctively, I respond with the smooth stone my father gave me.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d cut out the personal comments and teach me Latin for a change,” I say, loudly and without expression.
“What is this, the new Dexter?” he says triumphantly.
A coruscating chorus of laughter breaks out among my fellow classmates.
“It’s not funny,” I yell back. Tears start running down my face.
I am done being bullied.
“You’ve been saying stuff like that at me all along. You made me out to be a faggot and a loser,” I retort, choking on my tears and snot.
An awkward silence fills the room.
Finding a shred of self-worth
“I’m sorry, Dexter,” he says. “I never intended to hurt your feelings. I was just having some fun, and thought you could take it.”
He went back to the front of the room to finish class.
Latin was supposed to be my savior. My reinvention. Yet, I am sitting at my desk with tears running down my face and snot soaking my shirt. My status as a loser, and my fate, forever sealed.
Or so I thought.
“Hey, I heard about what you did in Parker’s class. You did good,” another teacher says to me a few days later. He made a point of walking out to me in the hallway as I walked by his room.
Despite my breakdown, the episode, and my mother’s subsequent call to the principal resulted in some sort of awkward truce between me and Parker.
This increased my confidence, ever so slightly.
“You’re just mad that my name is in the textbook and yours isn’t,” I say to him one day after he gives me crap about my homework.
“What are you talking about?” he asks, looking confused.
“My name, Dexter, is right here in the book,” I explain, pointing to the dictionary in the back of the text. (Dexter means “right” in Latin.)
He laughs. “Not bad. Not bad,” he admits.
Day ~800: Peace be With You
During the last week of the school year, we hold an awards ceremony in the gymnasium. In spite of our truce, I am still flunking Latin.
“Dexter, what did you do with your Latin award?” Parker asks me when we arrive back in the classroom.
“I burned it,” I say, without missing a beat.
The class, and Parker, laugh. But this time, at my joke, not at me.
A few days later, I show up for the final exam, make a few cursory attempts to fill in the blanks, and then hand in my incomplete test.
“Pax Vobiscum (Peace be with You),” he says to me as I leave.
I think part of him actually thought he meant it.
Seeking Reinvention on the West Coast
Mr. Parker left teaching the following year and returned to seminary. This time, he was ordained as a Catholic priest. And no, the irony is not lost on me.
I saw him three years later when he gave the benediction at my graduation.
“Hello,” I said to him as I walked past with my diploma. He returned the gesture with an exaggerated air of blessing.
“You should have given him the finger,” my dad said, indifferent to Parker’s status as a man of the cloth.
“You already had your diploma,” he said. “What could the bastards do to you?”
A few months later, I got on an airplane and headed off to college in the Pacific Northwest.
A new state, a new school, a new scene.
I was going to reinvent myself. Or at least figure out who I am.
