I was one of those late bloomers (it’s a joke in our house that I still seem to learn some things about being a grownup later than everyone else…). In my 6th and 7th grade years, the girls I knew were divided between dealing with the embarrassment of having breasts and bleeding, and dealing with embarrassment of not having them. Of being left behind. And I had short enough hair when I was that age that I was still getting called “son” by the occasional inattentive or distracted stranger. It did nothing for my self image, and I’m sure it’s one of the reasons I began to grow my hair as a teenager: to prove that I could, even if I couldn’t seem to do any of the rest of it “right.”
I never wanted to be a boy. But when I look back on my childhood, I realize how lucky I was to have been given many of a boy’s freedom’s: it was the South in the late 60’s/early 70’s, and most of my girlfriends were pretty overtly gendered by their parents. Of course it rubbed off on me — peer influence is one of the strongest forces in the human animal, both the doing and the being done to. At my friends’ houses I sat mystified on the sidelines of discussions about training bras (I swear, I am not making this up. Do they still do that?) and shaving and eyebrow shaping… but at home I was allowed to be non-girly, smart, to read whatever I wanted, to ride my bicycle as far as my legs would take me (although I gave my dad a bad moment one day when he was driving on one of Tampa’s busiest 6-lane arterials and saw me madly pumping along on the sidewalk, on the wrong side of the street from home).
I never wanted to be a boy: but since I had the chance to act like one for a while, I wish now I’d been better at it. I wish I had learned boy skills, not just boy autonomy. I wish I had learned to give a punch in the stomach as well as take one (my welcome to the neighborhood present from a gang of boys when I was 6). I wish I’d learned to treat getting hurt like getting a bad lunch — an oh, well kind of thing — but instead I was so physically timid that I wouldn’t even learn to swing by my knees from the trapeze, as much as I longed to. I wish that I’d learned to get right up in other people’s faces and get mad, tell them to knock it off, instead of just keeping quiet or resorting to interminable hedging as a way to protect myself. From what? From bad words or bad thoughts or maybe the occasional shove on the playground? What would have been so bad about that? I wish I knew then that those things are easier to learn at age 8 than 48.
Nicola and I have both written about how much we love and appreciate our neighbors. All of them except one set of folks on the street behind us, who made our first two years here occasional hell with their fucking noise. They seemed to have no conception at all that sound carries, and that playing their radio outside at volume 11 might actually not be other people’s idea of great entertainment. They started having outdoor parties every weekend. They started inviting people over who got drunk in the backyard, yelled and screamed, called each other motherfucker and bitch, until 2 in the morning. And all of it carried into our house as if they’d hung speakers in our living room. It was a nightmare.
I absolutely hate confronting people about this kind of thing. I do it, but Christ, I hate it. I’m not the least confident person in the world, but this twists me up something fierce. So I would get up and go over there in the middle of the night and ask them to dial it down, and they would for 20 minutes, and then it would start to creep up. I called the police, but they often had better things to do on a Saturday night (which I totally understand and support). And I started to get so stressed about it that it literally made me sick.
Why couldn’t I just be a boy for ten minutes? Walk over there, say Shut the fuck up or I’m calling the cops, come home. Why did I need them to actually understand that they were having a hideous impact? Why did I need them to want to behave better? If I were a boy, it would be enough to actually make them behave better, whether they wanted to or not.
I did do this once, in our previous neighborhood. The Young People who were renting 6-to-the-house across the street thought they were still living on campus, so they had loud screaming punk rock parties out in the front yard every weekend. We complained, they didn’t really care, it went on. One night I just snapped. It was pouring rain, and I threw on the minimum of clothes and stalked over there in my bare feet, righteously pissed. The Young People were crowded onto the porch: they took one look at me and fled inside. That was a rush, I gotta tell you — they ran away from me! That’s what it’s like to be a boy, you can actually scare people away!
One Young Man stayed sitting on his porch because he was too drunk to stand up. He made the mistake of arguing with me that he had the right to have a party in his own house. And I just… went. I yelled, I swore, I threatened him with the police, and I ordered him back into the house. And he went.
And I went home in the rain so shaky that I had to take drugs to sleep. Not scared, exactly, but profoundly unsettled. And that wasn’t a nice feeling, at all.
The next day he came by to apologize. By then, another of my neighbors had organized a letter from the five houses around the Young People to complain to them and their landlord. I told him to expect the letter; and he was genuinely surprised to hear that people around there didn’t like him a lot. Jesus.
The neighbor thing here worked out, pretty much. We had bonded so well with our wonderful neighbors in our own cul-de-sac that when I remembered the previous letter experience and asked them to sign a letter with me, they agreed. They supported me when I emailed the police. And the police turn out to have a Neighborhood Team, with wonderful officers who take disturbing the peace very seriously.
One of those wonderful officers called me when my email was forwarded to him. “Kelley,” he said, “I’m going to take care of this for you.” And he did, that same day. And I was grateful because someone else was making the Noisy People be quiet; a thing I couldn’t seem to do myself.
All has been well until this weekend, when we were greeted on Saturday morning by a blast of music so loud that I thought my ears would bleed. I went over to my neighbors across the street (we’re now talking hundreds of feet from the Noisy People), and the radio was as clear as a bell there too. Really loud.
So I sucked it up and came home and called the Noisy People to complain, since I had their phone number as a result of the whole police intervention thing. I had to leave a message because, I assume, no one could actually hear the phone ring.
About a half hour later, one of my cul-de-sac neighbors stopped by to let me know that he had heard the music, got pissed, went over there, told them to turn it down or he’d call the police, and walked away.
They turned it down.
Why couldn’t I have done that with the obvious lack of stress that he did? And if I had done it, would it have worked? I don’t know. The Noisy Person called later and we had an awkward conversation, but at least we talked. That was important to me, sure, but is it actually better? Will it make a difference? I don’t know.
But sometimes I wish I were a better boy.
