The night before I walked into my 4^th grade classroom my mind spun from brain to heart to stomach as I pictured myself stuttering and stammering while everyone laughed. It was difficult  entering a class in mid-term, even though I should have been used to it. My family moved seven times before I entered PS9. The following morning, I dropped my sister off inside the school where the younger kids assembled before going upstairs to their classrooms.

Outside in the schoolyard there were chalk lines and class numbers to indicate where each class was to stand. I joined a few other kids lined up early as others ran around the yard of flipped cards while waiting for the whistle to be blown. I looked down, trying not to make eye contact, trying not to stand out.

A boy standing in front of me, a tall thin kid with a large Adam’s Apple and creepy large eyes, kept turning around and looking at me, sneering, I thought. He resembled someone who had tormented me in the first grade. It was sure I was going to have trouble with him, as always. A teacher called out for us to enter the school, I heared him whispering behind me.

It is terrible to be bullied. I felt small, weak and cowardly. I wasn’t weak. As the son of a janitor, I had spent years carrying coal from the front of the cellar to the boiler room, years pulling dumbwaiters, carrying garbage cans and cans filled with ash from the boiler up to the street. I was stronger than I looked. Still, I wasn’t a fighter. My reflexes were slow, and once involved in a fight I usually ended up with someone’s knees on my shoulders, helplessly looking up at my Opponent

. I didn’t imagine this time would be better.

In the classroom, the teacher pointed to an empty seat in the back row, indicating where I was to sit. She called roll. As each student spoke his or her name, I drowned in anxiety. The thought of getting up and speaking out my name seemed as impossible as breathing underwater. At last I stood and stuttered the first syllable of my name and the rest of it got caught, stuck in my throat. Nothing came out of my mouth but an animal sound, a gurgle of sound squeezed our as my face turned red and my breath paused to let my ears hear the laughter of the class.

This had happened before in almost every class I entered, and teachers unusually came to my rescue shouting for the class to be quiet, sometimes just asking me to sit down while reprimanding the behavior of the class. My new teacher, Miss Rosenberg, did neither. Instead, she simply waited for me to get my name out, ignoring the laughter, letting it die down of its own accord.

Her unique strategy, as it turned out, worked: the laughter faded, the class grew silent until only one voice continued laughing. That voice was Richie’s whom I dreaded. When he realized he was alone in mocking me, he too stopped and turned his head back to face the front of the class, but not before throwing me a look of pure malice. It gave me time to compose myself. When I spoke again it was with only a trace of a stutter. Miss Rosenberg gave me a nod. My ordeal was over, until Richie looked at me again and made weird faces like he was strangling, imitating my struggle to get my name out.

When the bell rang, and everyone lined up to go to recess. Richie rushed to stand behind me and as we walked down the stairwell to get to the schoolyard, I wasn’t surprised to hear a voice saying, “Fagot, hey fagot I’m ta, ta, ta, talking to you.” I tried to ignore him, to just keep walking as if I hadn’t heard what he said. Then he started poking and pushing me until I felt my temper rise only to fizzle out as fear took over and I flushed with shame for being afraid.

At the end of the day, I met my sister by an exit leading onto 139^th Street. I did this to avoid Richie whom I imagined was waiting outside for me. I couldn’t tell this to my sister. We always protected each other from our father when he drank, from the meanness of my brother, and from hurtful adults and children we came in contact with. I said nothing and let her chatter to me as I kept looking around, expecting Richie to jump out of a doorway or from behind a parked car.

The next few days at school were no better, and Richie had plenty of opportunities to shove me in the ribs, knuckle me in the back, and call me names. And it didn’t take him long to gather a few other kids willing to back up his taunting, and to call me chicken for not responding.

Day after day it continued. I shrunk inside of myself as Richie grew bolder in his bullying. Several times he was called out by the teacher, but it only made it worse because he blamed me. One day, we had a substitute teacher who called me up to the blackboard to answer some question in arithmetic. I answered the question correctly and went to sit down. “Wait.” the substitute commanded. “What’s your name?”

I answered her, stumbling only a little as I replied. I was getting ready to return to my seat when she called out to me, “Francis, I want you to tell the class your name, only this time, relax, take a deep breath, and speak slowly.” 

It was advice I heard all too often—and I hated it. I hated when someone told to speak slowly. I was speaking slowly. Between stuttering and stammering it could take me a quarter of an hour to get out a sentence. How much slower did they want me to go? And about that relax thing, how do you relax when a word gets stuck in your throat like a fly on flypaper?

To my grateful surprise, and in answer to my most fervent prayer, I got through saying my name and the questions she asked without stumbling over my words. The teacher smiled and said to me, “See, it’s easy when you speak slowly.”

Yeah, I thought, it’s easy for you to tell me what to do. I walked back to my seat and, distracted, I didn’t noticed the foot Richie stuck out as I was passing his desk. I fell down, sprawled between desks. I felt a pain in my arm where I had fallen on it, and I heard the entire class breakout in laughter until the teacher slammed a book down on her desk and shouted for the class to shut up. I had never heard a teacher say that to a class, or to a student. Nor was I the only one to be shocked by her shout. The whole class went silent.

“Are you hurt? the teacher asked me. “No.” I replied. It wasn’t true. I returned to my desk where I immediately began chewing on a piece of paper torn from my composition book. It was a habit I picked up after I stopped chewing on my collars.

I couldn’t sleep that night. My arm hurt and the movie projector in my head kept playing the scene of me falling and I could hear the laughter grow louder and louder and I fantasized hitting Richie in the mouth. At school, the other kids in the class kept asking me why I didn’t fight Richie, shaking their heads at my reluctance to fight back. Richie’s bullying grew worse.

At home my mother kept asked me what was wrong. She saw some of the bruises on ny body from where he gave me his “knuckle sandwiches.” I thought of asking my older brother for help He was big enough, and old enough to maybe frighten Richie off, but I didn’t. I wasn’t certain he would help even if he could.

And then one morning Richie went too far. He attacked my sister, pulled her dress up. I didn’t see it, didn’t know about it until that afternoon on our way home. My sister was more annoyed than frightened “I should have scratched his face,” She said. But by the next morning she seemed to have forgotten the whole incident. I felt relieved and I crawled deeper and deeper into myself.

After dropping my sister off the next morning, I saw Richie taunting some girls from the 3^rd grade who were playing hopscotch on the other side of the fence, my sister among them. And just like that, all the weeks of fear, anxiety, the self-loathing, and misery dissipated, and in its place, there was anger. I went half crazy, maybe more than half. Coming up from behind him I took a pencil from the composition book I was carrying, dropped the book on the ground; then I got right behind him and placed the pencil below his pultruding Adam’s Apple. I grabbed the back of his collar and pulled him off-balance so that his body fell against mine. “I’m going to stick this pencil in your stupid neck,” I said.

To my complete surprise Richie started crying and pleading with me not to hurt him. I half believed he was joking, pretending, so extreme was his reaction. It was like a horror film, like when Lon Chaney Jr. turned into the Wolf Man, only instead of Richie turning into a wolf he became a quivering jellyfish. When I let him go, whispering a warning to stay away from me and my sister, he was still crying.

As he ran to the other side of the yard I felt a surge of relief, and then pride, and yet, another part of me felt weak, almost like I could faint.

My sister saw the whole incident and came running inside the schoolyard, crying, “Pat, Pat.” She thought I was hurt, then seeing Richie at the other end of the yard, seeing him bent over like he was about to be sick, she call out to him, “Stupid Jerk. You Stupid Jerk.” She was smiling and crying at the same time. No one had came over to comfort him

I remained at PS9 for two and a half years, the longest I ever stayed at one school. And in that entire time Richie never bothered me again. As for myself, I couldn’t help putting a finger to my neck every time I caught him looking at me. I delighted in seeing the fear come over him. Until one day I stopped. I don’t know why. It was a long time ago. But one thing remains to be said, we were both pretty stupid that day—but I was the one holding the pencil.