Op/Ed
Cy-Fair ISD didn’t shoot Asher Brown – they just watched him load the gun and looked the other way.
Author’s note: This is a re-post of a piece I originally published on Makingcopy.com (now defunct) in October 2010.
Asher Brown’s self-inflicted bullet to the head may as well have been shot by the good-old-boy school district administrators of Cypress Fairbanks Independent School District, a sprawling diploma-mill with a well-established history of coveting test scores much more than gay children. The lockers Asher was slammed into by pre-teen meat heads, the staunch smells of musty armpits and cheap cologne – or far more likely today, Axe Body Spray – that permeate the boy’s changing room at Hamilton Middle School are just a couple miles from the junior high where the same meat-heads by different names, the same stinky feet attached to different legs, bullied me nearly 20 years ago. All that has changed in more than twenty years is the date on the calendar, it seems, the packaging of deodorants, and unless the Utah claw is back, possibly the hairstyles.
By the time I was thirteen, everyone knew I was gay. There was simply no doubt about it; socks matched perfectly to my shirts, the Marilyn Monroe necktie I wore unflinchingly with a long sleeve denim shirt tucked into white shorts, the coconut brazierre and grass skirt I donned for a skit from South Pacific for a school play. While I’ve never lisped, I’ve always spoken a bit differently, almost as if I have invented my own accent. My frame is slender and I don’t know how to throw a single punch with conviction, much less a combination. My curly, mangy locks were everything the popular skater hair-do’s of the 1980’s (and later, the fades with distinct “lines”, and worst of all, rat-tails and cowboy mullets) stood against. I’m sure I’ve been caught standing limp wrist-ed as recently as this morning. I saw New Kids on the Block headline (with Tiffany opening) at the Southern Star Ampitheater at Astroworld my 5th grade year; Jordan Knight was my favorite, and yes, I wore a fedora to the show.
In Cypress, Texas – a suburb of northwest Houston – in the late 1980’s, being gay meant I was a faggot. What appears a seemingly harmless extension of Houston’s Brobdingnagian wingspan of strip malls, gas stations, and billboards was (within my lifetime) a rural town clinging on to the last of its acreage farms, moonshine stills, and KKK members. A handful of the natives hailed from a purebred line of sons-of-bitches who made the ill-advised decision to begot sons of sons of bitches. Lest I make it sound too much like the wild west, consider this; the same boys who shot an innocent horse before school in the morning (yes, this actually happened) could also be seen at the shopping mall or roller rink in the evening, or playing mini-golf or drinking 12-packs of Bud Ice under an overpass on the outskirts of town. Their pickup trucks were less often utilitarian workhorses and more often aftermarket posers with flashy paint jobs and confederate flags (or arguably worse, Looney Toons characters, or Calvin peeing on the Ford logo, or Calvin Peeing on Hobbes) in the window.
Being a 6thgrade faggot was, depending on the exact minute of the day, either slightly better or worse than being black, Latino, mentally retarded, or covered in scabs in terms of how much you would pay in anguish for something you had no choice in. In Cy-Fair ISD in the 1980’s and 90’s, involuntary traits like skin color or sexuality were enough to attract physical (not to mention the equally scorning verbal) abuse in gluttonous portions. I sought to avoid confrontation at all costs, which made me an even easier target at school. More common than face-to-face altercations were “punch and runs” where an assailant would hit me as hard as he could in the back and then escape into the crowded hallways. The worst kids seem to have highly evolved thumping and flicking abilities. I’ve never flicked something and made it bleed, but these kids knew how.
On the bus, it was projectiles. Spitballs were physically harmless but humiliating. “AA” batteries were flat out dangerous and not at all off-limits. Looking back at my middle and high schools, popularity could be seemingly measured by how truly cruel you were willing to be to another person. But before I pass myself off as friendless and unloved, rest assured that I was not; I had many wonderful friends, and many people in the same social circles as the bullies would either come to my defense, or at least walk away in lieu of joining their buddies taunts. If 90 percent of your day is wonderful – you get a good grade on your test, laugh with friends at lunch, get a sweet note from an admirer – but you get punched in the face and called a fucking faggot as the remaining 10 percent, do you go home happy?
It seems far-fetched that as recently as the mid-1990’s, in a middle class suburb of one of the nation’s largest cities – the same city that has elected democratic mayors as far back as I can remember, and now has an openly gay one to boot – I could stand at the edge of my driveway and watch pickup trucks full of Caucasian cowboys chasing pickup trucks full of Hispanic immigrants at high speeds through my neighborhood, screaming racial slurs and alluding to the violence that was to come when the gas tanks ran out or they inevitably turned onto a dead-end street.
What seems even more far-fetched – even unbelievable, yet I have absolutely no doubt it is true – is that there is little support in a district like CFISD for an exceptionally smart, attractive adolescent like Asher Brown once you throw homosexual into the equation. Television and movies would have us believe that being gay these days can actually make you even cooler in some schools and social circles. Sure, there are some individual teachers and administrators that care immensely; I can name several of them that are still there after all these years. I can also name the teachers that ignored what was happening to me, that gossiped in the teacher’s lounge that I was gay, themselves as afraid of what that meant to their comfortable community.
While I was enrolled in school at Cypress Fairbanks ISD, they launched a zero tolerance policy for drugs and alcohol that landed several good friends of mine in the school district’s equivalent of minimum security prison, an “alternative learning center” where they corral the criminals. Australia, for lack of a better analogy. One of my friends was sent there over a small amount of marijuana. Yet the school’s most violent offenders – guys with repeat records of fighting, and far worse, senselessly harming people that wouldn’t or couldn’t even fight back – roamed the halls free and clear, slapped on the wrist with a day or two of detention or suspension for their charades. Unless much has changed, the district fought wars on drugs, gangs, and baggy pants. Bullies were completely off the radar.
Before Cypress, TX can confront bullies, I am afraid they need to confront their own values. As the area has grown far more racially diverse, the population has stayed frozen in time, it would seem, in truly accepting people from all walks of life, including gays and bisexuals. I can’t even imagine what Cypress would do with a transgendered person, but fire hoses and burning crosses would not be a far stretch. “Gay” is not something that is defended in Cypress. It is run from, seen as something that should be feared. He would be more likely to have encountered “help” in the form of a religious group eager to help convert him to heterosexuality than he would someone who would accept him for what that very God made him.
Cy-Fair will no doubt respond to the crisis in a form seemingly sufficient in the eyes of the taxpayers of the community. They will bring in the suicide experts, and hold assemblies at the school to talk about the resources at hand to at-risk kids. I would be surprised if the words homosexual are uttered even under baited breath. I would be surprised if the bullies who put the gun in his hand, cocked it and loaded it, are sent to the alternative learning center for their roles in this tragedy. They are likely far too essential to the school’s football team or FFA program or have parents who generously donate to the booster club to walk away with any blood on their hands. No, I don’t think the school district wanted Asher Brown to kill himself. I just think they’ll look the other way now that he has.
For the record, I believe Asher’s parents. As district administrators vehemently deny having been contacted and made known of the challenges Asher was experiencing, his parents cite multiple instances of meetings with guidance counselors. This is a district that is not above making evidence disappear. Even their teachers are only supported until it is no longer convenient to support them. More than one great teacher has been made the fall-guy in Cy-Fair ISD. When you are the superintendent of a corporation like CFISD, you are a CEO. And we all know how that story has played out.
In the early 1990’s, my sister, a lesbian, had to drive to inner-city to Houston to find gay and lesbian support groups like HATCH (Houston Area Teen Coalition of Homosexuals) when she was in school in Cypress. Our parents had to do the same to find resources like PFLAG (Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays). And as great as these organizations are, and as wonderful as it would be to see the school district launch similar programs in house, the burden should not be exclusively on a gay or bullied child to seek help. Thinking back to my own youth, it amazes me, the things that could happen to me in the hallways of my own school, in the community I was born and raised in, without recourse or reprimand.
I’m still angry. I still have nightmares. I still plot revenges I will never act upon, wait for apologies that will never come from my tormentors. I see them on Facebook, friends of friends of friends, and feel a brief sense of panic followed by a surge or adrenaline, a fight or flight mechanism that grows tiring and shameful in its repetition. It makes sense to me that these teenagers see death as a way out. It’s the wrong way out. But if we make them feel guilty about themselves, shame them, and fail to protect them, what other option do they have?
As it turns out, I’m not gay at all. I never was, but bullies aren’t known for listening. I got off easy, in that sense; I never knew what it was like to be made to feel guilty for who I was inside, only for what people thought I was. I am immensely proud of Asher Brown for having the courage to stand up for who he was. My heart hurts that we failed him.
Filed under: Poetry | Leave a Comment
Beichuan the Assassin
Jianjiang river
undulates
to a deceptive cadence,
grinds her hips like Brazil.
Jesus, jumping or no.
Happy Buddha,
the man and not the dish.
Professors of geology, everywhere:
We congratulate you on
a most spectacular opening.
An evening of murderous reverberations.
Brought us to our feet. Our knees. Our longest rest.
Cut-rate coffee,
great businessman of the East,
lead-based paint,
take note:
Every courtship, marriage,
the birth and death of every daughter
everywhere
is this bone white china
at cupboard’s edge.
May it luck out.
Should tide be willing,
please call on Beichuan the Assassin.
Ask her grace only if she’d be so kind
as to spare someone,
a reminder,
a clue.
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In Queue
Netflix sent Gandhi.
I eat Cool Whip from the tub,
wishing I had faith.
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Heads will roll for this
3 dozen men
from Santiago
flew in for our pitch.
Said thanks, gave them each a flashlight.
Deals will be done.
The evening headline reads,
‘FAA to 36 passengers: No Chile for you.
Matching flashlights cause airport scare. ’
There is always next time.
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Layaway
I could pick out anything I wanted
at Christmas and birthdays.This let mom make easy payments
that weren’t easy, could never have been
with dad’s salary, new Western needs.
School clothes, too;
Outfit after outfit, my faith placed in them to
make me cool. A suede jacket at full price because mom
wanted everything for me.
Store credit cards touting incentives
like a shit storm of poverty
looked good to us.
We turned our back on layaway.
No payments for a year! We were rats
to alcohol, freed from the waiting
and paying and waiting and paying. Working for something. Owning it.
We signed up, two litres of cola for the trouble
and bought cameras (still and moving),
“Italian” textiles made in Korea, shipped by way of Italy,
monogrammed hip flasks, noise canceling headphones,
television satellites, phones we touch more
than our lovers
that led to magnificent cars,
ripping out perfectly good countertops,
a new refrigerator just like the old one but stainless,
if by stainless you mean “impossible to keep clean”.
Now, bilked good
with no chicken left on the bone,
having borrowed against things we are borrowing,
traded wives for nannies, Wii Fits, carryout,
it only makes sense that nothing fails,
lest we remember it takes two hands to spit
and shake on it,
we run these death camps,
there are too few boats for all of us the next time it floods.
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Summer 1993 (For Becky)
Tony Spatola’s cold hard cash
was sno-cone red,
wadded fives and wadded ones
drizzled medicinal grape.
Earning it meant 10 hour days
at the igloo, shaving ice and counting cups,
tallying styrofoam like there was an
accounting department, loss prevention, something to even lose
that wasn’t long since gone.
How we basked in fringe benefits like cavities,
juvenile onset diabetes,
the ability to mound ice flawlessly
with a gasoline funnel.
Lessons learned:
You have to start somewhere. Everything ferments.
I get scared when I’m alone.
Tony stopped by once and yelled
about everything, alarmingly angry
for a purveyor of children’s rainbow dreams,
frozen water.
Maybe Becky tasted
tamarindo, chamoyada,
maybe she knows why latinos turned up in droves
at 5 minutes to close?
Peddling home past dusk,
mustachioed in primary colors and
stuck to myself, pruned
I would hum a Pumpkins tune
and play like I wasn’t fifteen,
wasn’t riding a ten-speed,
wouldn’t have given it up
in a heartbeat for a job at the mall
selling shoes.
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Son and Father
It is hard to understand why
some lights go from green to red,
never yellow.
Short is not empty
like unborn is not shelter.
He knew the pains of war,
the joy of new mornings.
Reunions, deployments,
hot tea and anything oatmeal raisin.
Our pumpkin seed,
my smallest hero,
started and stopped without
time to slow, full speed to
never.
He watches me write,
knows he is better.
There are no words we share,
the angels and the left behind.
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Westbrook
As I whisper
don’t hold back
to what might be cilantro
the wind plays two leaves
against each other,
like dogfighting dragon flies,
and my enthrallment is
your father.
Very next day
I pass him on a map
in a forgotten book,
the pages turned sleepy
from his tight command.
He asks I relay:
I come back in everything
new, only left
to find more for us
to learn.
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We’ve been approved (Great News)
Now that the bank has loaned us a home,
the bank has loaned us two cars
and we’ve borrowed careers
with our borrowed degrees
and the loans could get called anytime
and our checks to the dr. for kid no. 1
precede bills for kid no. 2
and our socks, select thoughts,
locks of hair, packs of cards
are not ours, and may never be.
I’m thinking we flee with our names
and our flaws
to try starving,
shivering
free.
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Fulcrum
Between the cucumber
and pickle
is vinegar,
the grape and raisin
is sun.
Citizen and criminal
just crime, or a frame,
Homemaker
homeless
a door.
Between devout
and fanatic
is the method of death,
old and antique
just an eye.
Lyric and poem
the intent of a song,
conqueror
conquered
a fight.
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