The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

“Hey, you wanna see what Suzie has in her backpack today?”

The backpack is sent flying and soon disgorges, and bruises, the cherished Académie sketch pad. Pencils bounce and scatter. Jane (as in Austen, yes) skitters across the asphalt.

“Suzie’s reading a girl’s book,” observes Alfred, the ringleader. “What a faggot.”

“Suzie is a girl,” says Jared, his sidekick. “Are you a girl, Suzie?”

“Can you guys just leave me alone,” I say firmly. My version of firmly. But my voice—I can’t help it—goes up at the end of the sentence.

“Can us guys just leave you alone?” Alfred echoes. “Sure we can, sweetie. But there’s something we need to check out first.”

Lunch hour at Wonderland Avenue Elementary School, fall semester, fourth grade. Jared wraps his ample arms around me and drags me behind the ball shed—a dreaded, even more unsupervised corner of the school yard. Before I know it I’m flat on the ground, looking up at the giant eucalyptus trees that tower over parts of the canyon and perfume it with their spicy, pungent scent. I will loathe that scent for years—forever.

Jared is a large, heavyset specimen with oily skin. His bottom smashes onto my face; he plants his feet on my hands. Alfred sits on my legs.

“If Suzie is a girl, why is she wearing boys’ clothes?” Alfred muses. “Hey, Suze, why are you wearing those boys’ clothes?”

Before I can answer, think how to answer, he adds, “Why don’t we see what she’s got down there?”

I try to kick them off me, but they settle in like two boulders.

“I’m not touching her down there. No way.”

“You could do it with your foot,” says Alfred. “Your shoe.”

“You can’t be sure what you’re feeling with your shoe,” says Jared.

“We could use a stick,” says Alfred.

“Same problem,” says Jared.

They ponder for a moment while I try to breathe.

“I’ll just do it. I’ll hold my breath or something,” says Alfred. “Here. Take her feet.”

The two of them change places. If I’d had a chance to eat any lunch, it would have come up out of me. Instead a foul taste fills my mouth, and it goes dry.

Alfred reaches for my belt buckle and yanks it open. His eyes glitter (why do they glitter?) as his hand shoots in … and down. And grips. Hard. The pain is sudden and deep, as if there were a live wire running between my groin and my stomach.

Only later does it occur to me to think, If I am the faggot, why is Alfred going beyond grip to exploration?

“She’s got one all right,” Alfred informs Jared. “A small one.”

He makes a show of wiping his hand off on his jeans.

“Maybe she’s a hermaphrodite,” Jared says.

“What’s that?”

“A boy with titties. Or a girl with a dick. I saw it in a book. There’s a sculpture, some ancient Roman thing, of a he-she.” He turns to Alfred. “Should I look?”

Alfred nods. Jared reaches for my shirt.

“No titties.” He kicks me in the chest. “But maybe this’ll make a nice little bump.”

“A dick and barely any titties. What is she, then?” wonders Alfred.

“Hell if I know,” says Jared.

Suzie. Sissy. Faggot. Latent homosexual (that one I had to look up). Was I what they said, what they called me? What was I? All I knew was that I wasn’t a boy the way they were boys. I certainly wasn’t a girl. And I didn’t feel an attraction to anyone at that age. I had only one matter on my mind, one goal: to make it through the school day without these thugs or their minions (and they had them, many of them) going after me.

I honed my approach over the years. After the incident behind the ball shed, I kept myself covered up. I buckled my belt so tightly that the clasp (brass, two-pronged) bit into my flesh, leaving indentations that were visible in a certain light for days afterward. I wore layers of T-shirts, short sleeve over long sleeve, though sometimes the other way around, to help insulate my body, even on seventy-, eighty-degree days. Of course I kept my distance, sitting off in a corner of the school yard bent over my reading or my sketching, as inward-turning and balled-up as it was possible for a tall, gangly, vigilant boy to be.

My technique didn’t always work. Well into middle school there was scarcely a season, outside of summer, when my body was without bruises in different evolving shades: blue-black, purple-blue, greenish-yellow, yellowish-beige.

My self—my inner self—was a different matter. From Alfred, my experience of Alfred, I trained myself to go dead. I went through a kind of ritual every morning as soon as I stepped out our front door. It lasted for the amount of time it took me to walk from our house to the bus stop. I began with my feet and worked my way up my entire body, stiffening and hardening it from within. Going dead inside in this way, deep inside, made me strong, impermeable. A warrior. That was how I thought of it: I was a warrior who every day went to do battle at Wonderland Avenue Elementary and later Bancroft Junior High. To be a target while other people did battle, though, was more accurate.

You don’t want to be ordinary, do you, Lovey? To fit in? Fitting in is a form of living death. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always.

I always did.

Alfred was a dead ringer for Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad magazine mascot that was Danny’s preferred reading material in these years. He even had his freckles, a version of his unorthodontured teeth, and a similar if slightly less exaggerated dead, mal-shaped left eye.

His modus operandi was to lie in wait, coiled and cobra-like, in all the interstitial spaces in the day where bullies tend to thrive. At the bus stop in the morning and again in the afternoon. On the playground at recess. Or at lunch hour, where he was often assisted in his machinations by his greasy, rotund sidekick, Jared.

But Alfred’s deepest, strangest power was his Janus-like changeability. At school he was a combination of demon and ringmaster. On the bus ride he liked to finish off the day’s work by digging his nails into the backs of my hands, gouging out tiny crescent-shaped bits of flesh into which a few drops of blood would rise up afterward. Yet as soon as the bus pulled away and the other neighborhood kids scattered, often, as often as not, he would turn to me and say, “So do you want to come over and play?” Or trade baseball cards (an early shared interest)? Or stamps (a later one)?

Absurdly to me now, I would answer, “Sure.” I would go home and change out of my school clothes, pick up my handball or my trading cards or my stamp collection, and I would cross the street to his house, or else he would cross the street with his things and come to mine. We played for hours together, in relative peace. I suppose I thought, or hoped, that these companionable afternoons of ours would work like goodwill in a savings account that I could draw on when we were back at school, but that turned out to be a particularly naive form of wishful thinking. The next day Alfred would greet me at the bus stop and look me over with those hard eyes of his: “Good morning, Suzie.” Then clack! Toe of shoe—penny loafer, cheap hard leather—striking shin or knee. I hoped for shin, since it was hard to hold yourself rigidly dead with a swollen knee.

When I cast the eye of memory over these scenes, inevitably I wonder, Where were the teachers, the principal? Did the bus driver never glance in the rearview mirror? Was the yard supervisor, under whose watch (whose lack of watch) so many excruciating moments played out, oblivious?

Where were my parents, my aunt and uncle?

My aunt and uncle are simpler to explain. For them, school was where I, all three of us boys, disappeared while they were writing. Once we stepped off the stage of the theater that was their lives, we were offstage in the most absolute sense, non-players, non-characters, simply non.

My parents are trickier. I did everything in my power to make sure they didn’t know what was happening to me at school. If they didn’t know, then at home I didn’t have to acknowledge how grueling and miserable my days were. School was a dream or (more accurately) a nightmare and therefore not real, not happening, not a place of affliction, embarrassment, and shame; or, alternatively, if it was happening, it was happening to a dead person, and therefore had no lasting effect. Home was different. The bookend to going dead at the beginning of the day, after all, was coming back to life at the end of it. When I climbed the hill from the bus stop to our house, I could feel the stiffness thawing and melting away from me as I resumed my more natural self, my regular shape. Home—Greenvalley Road—was my refuge, my retreat, and I did everything I could to keep it that way.

But even the best-maintained refuges can sometimes be breached.

My parents’ attention was often elsewhere in these years. My father was expanding his business and responsible for his brother, for whom he’d created a job in that growing business; his mother, until her death; and afterward his mother-in-law. There were days, many days, when he came home late from work and fell asleep early after dinner; weekends he disappeared into sports and card games. His idea of parenting, for the most part, consisted of providing for us, disciplining us (typically by erupting at us), and trying to engage us in his passion for cars, tennis, and skiing; if we weren’t as captivated by these things as he was, we did not see much of him.

My mother was far more present, but as we grew older and her attention was loosened from having to juggle the logistics of our lives, it began to turn inward, and soon she started to undergo a change of her own, which accelerated in late 1972 and early 1973, around the time Ms. magazine published an article on the subject of consciousness-raising groups. This article lit a fire under a handful of Laurel Canyon mothers, who began meeting in one another’s living rooms on Tuesday evenings at six o’clock to talk about their lives and what they wanted to alter about them and how best to go about it. The husbands were asked—in some houses, instructed—to take the children out to dinner as the wives uncorked bottles of Chablis and opened up runny wedges of Brie that were paired with bunches of green grapes (unless there was a Cesar Chavez–led protest in progress) and plates of Triscuit crackers fanned out just so.

Whenever I saw my mother assemble this array of food and arrange a circle of chairs in our living room, I immediately felt a sense of agitation that I in no way understood. On these and most Tuesday evenings I peppered her with questions: Did she talk about us boys? Dad? Grandma? Auntie Hankie and Uncle Irving? I worried about them—about Auntie Hankie—most of all. “One of the rules of the CR group,” my mother answered, “is that we keep everything private. It’s the only way to sustain one another and ourselves. We have to be supportive, non-judging, and discreet. So I’m afraid I can’t answer these questions, dear. Any questions, really.”

My mother said these words lightly, but they did not sound like her—was that because they were lifted from the magazine? A dog-eared copy of the March 1973 issue appeared alongside the Brie and Chablis in the first months the group met; after that, apparently, the women knew what they were doing without such tangible editorial guidance.

What were they doing? It took me a while—months—before a Tuesday rolled around on which my mother was hosting and my father was kept late at work. When she received this news by telephone, my mother very solemnly gathered us boys together and, as she assembled a tray of sandwiches for us to take upstairs, explained that we were in no uncertain terms to think of leaving our rooms until she called up to us to say that the group had disbanded and the coast was clear.