My Brother Was Shot With A Brick, by Rosicky Jones

I cried every single night before school during the fourth grade.  I hated my life.

I have a scar above my left eye from getting hit with a brick by a group of kids.  There were two full basketball courts, and I was shooting on one end when they asked me to move.  I moved to the other full court and began shooting. Soon, they asked me to move again, this time a little less courteously. So I moved to the other end of the second court.  When they asked me to move yet again, I protested, and then I was nailed in the face with a brick.

My little sister, who I was watching at the time, ran home screaming, “my brother was shot with a brick.”  I should have followed her home screaming “I was shot with a brick,” but I knew my dad would have given me the dreaded “act like a fuckin man” look, which would have cut deeper than any brick.  I don’t fault my dad; he is stoic, straightforward, and unrepentantly proud.  He grew up in the middle of war.  He was, and is, an academic and a brilliant mathematician that spent time debating the recurrence and decomposition of the golden-ratio and Fibonacci’s convergence with mathematicians both Arabic and Israeli.  All he gave a shit about was math and he was obsessed with engaging other mathematicians, regardless of race or religion.  Every girl I have ever dated has asked me if my dad would like them, and I always ask them if they can perform exponential smoothing or define matrix theory, and when they respond with a no, I tell them that my dad will probably not validate their existence.  He did not want to raise my siblings and I anywhere but America.  It’s trite to say, but it is the truth, this country was and is pretty amazing.  So the cliché continues, he worked his ass off and got to America.  We had no money when we came and had barely any money when I was younger.  My dad crushed and finished his Ph.D and got a couple crazy ass masters degrees in the process.  So coming home, looking him in the eye, and telling him that I didn’t fight back felt like a bigger failure than any ass whipping I would endure trying to fight back would have.  So I grabbed a stick and beat the brick thrower as hard as I could until his friends kicked my ass.

My childhood fights were non-stop.  They were such a pall over my life that I had to develop defenses.  I became a crossing guard in fifth grade not because I gave a shit about being a crossing guard, but because it gave me a logical reason to stay after school a bit longer.  I could then walk home in peace, because most of the bullies wouldn’t wait around to fight me.  The logic also came into play because it also allowed me to avoid bawling my eyes out in front of my parents and begging my mommy to pick me up from my classroom door to drive me home because of the “mean kids at school.”  It is really tough to tell your parents that you’re getting fucked with, because for some reason it adds another layer of shame; it almost validates the bullying.  If I couldn’t fend for myself, maybe they were right for picking on me.  My mom is the quintessential “loving mother” and to this day she will baby me if I have the hint of a cold or if she knows I had rough day, and I still couldn’t tell her that I hated my elementary school life.  The crossing guard shtick was going swimmingly until Ian Adams tried pushing me into traffic during one of my shifts.   Once my balance had been regained, I went home run derby on him with my guard pole, and was then kicked off the guard team.

My story is not unique, but it seemed pertinent when I read, last week, about the suicide of 13-year old Asher Brown, who killed himself after being bullied relentlessly because of his sexual orientation.

I could escape the feelings of inadequacy when I got home, when I got to watch TV, or when I went to the library. I spent nearly every Saturday and Sunday reading Encyclopedia Brown and Bobbsy Twin books.  My dad would even let me play around with the math problems he gave to his college students.  I had plenty of opportunities to wash off the patina of abuse.  I didn’t feel like the whole world detested me, just the part of the world I went to school with.

Kids are cunts to other kids – regardless of sexual orientation.

But Asher Brown never had a chance. His suicide is less a hate crime and more a referendum on society as a whole.  Being gay automatically makes you more likely to commit suicide – statistically speaking.  That is an issue that goes deeper than kids picking on kids.  It is very difficult to reach a point of self-acceptance, it is a point so few of us even approach; that merely advancing enough to validate its existence is transcendental.  This is harder for gay youth because they internalize an image that mirrors societal predispositions.  This is harder for gay youth because societal predispositions are harder on gay youth.  I think we are far too quick as a society to blanket an isolated problem with a generalizable condition and try and solve it with a generic solution. I don’t think a gay kid getting picked on is a hate crime; I think it is a childhood crime.  I do think that gay kids resorting to suicide at a tilt of nearly 3 to 1 is more than a crime, it is a symptom of an epidemic -the stigmatization of homosexuals.  I don’t know what the answer is, and I’d like to think that we are inching closer to a point of equality, but I don’t know.  I do know that we should all feel remorse and a bit of responsibility for a society where death is seen as a viable option over living gay.

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