Breaking the Surface (6 page)

School was hardly a refuge from what was going on at home. As soon as Despina started school, I couldn’t wait to go. She brought home books, and she had new friends. I thought it would be a lot of fun, like my acrobatics classes. Well, it wasn’t. From almost the first day at Chase Elementary School the other kids started calling me names. At first they teased me because I stuttered, and they called me “nigger” because my Samoan complexion got very dark in the San Diego sun. Almost all the kids at my school were white.

At the time, I didn’t know
what
I was. I knew my natural father was from Samoa, but I didn’t know where Samoa was. For all I knew, I
was
from Africa, so it made odd sense to me why they were calling me that. It didn’t occur to me to ask my parents or to look in the atlas to see where Samoa was. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered I was a Pacific Islander. This was not a time when people celebrated ethnic diversity, and you can see why I think it’s so necessary.

There was only one other kid at school whose skin, was dark. He was from India, so no one knew what to make of him. He wasn’t very popular, and I didn’t go out of my way to be his friend. I was afraid, because I thought my classmates would say, “Oh look, the niggers stick together.”

Because of my stutter, I was put in a speech-therapy class. Most of the kids in that class were mentally impaired in addition to having speech impediments. I didn’t feel like I belonged there, but I had this problem, so I thought that I must be like them, that I must be retarded too. After I got put into a special reading class, the other kids started calling me “retard.” From the start, I had trouble reading, but it got really bad once we got past single words and simple sentences. Unfortunately, the special class didn’t help. I got frustrated and withdrew into my shell and wouldn’t talk. After school, I went to my room and closed the door.

My teachers sent me home with books for Mom to read with me, and she tried to help me. But that was even more frustrating, because she tried to show me how to read the way she read, the way most people read. What I couldn’t explain—and what I didn’t realize—was that I was dyslexic. I couldn’t explain that I read a sentence forward, then backward, then forward again before I can get the letters and the words in order, so I can figure out what the sentence means. It never occurred to me to say anything about the way I read, because I just thought I was a little slower than other people. I thought this until my dyslexia was diagnosed in college.

One time my Aunt Geri—who’s not really an aunt but my godmother—tried to help me. She bragged to my mother that she could have me reading in an hour. So she took me into my room, but before the hour was out, she said to Mom, “Don’t ever ask me to do that again.”

My mother could not understand what the problem was. When I was first learning, I could read books where there were single words, like
ball
or
dog
. I could even read three-word sentences. It was easy for me to unscramble small words and sentences like “The dog barked.” But any more words than that took me a long time to unscramble, which I couldn’t explain to my mother. All my mom could do was blame my teachers.

I didn’t complain about the name-calling until everyone found out that I did acrobatics. That was when they started calling me “sissy.” I went to my teacher and told her it made me feel “red hot” when the kids called me names. I told her which names they called me, and she said, “They could have called you a lot worse.” I took her remark to mean that I deserved what I was getting and that I was worse than what they were calling me. I never said a word about any of this to my mother, and she had no idea why I always seemed so unhappy, beyond the fact I was having trouble reading.

For me, unlike for most of the other “sissies,” the bright spot was athletics. At first, I was one of the last ones picked for team sports because I was small, but once the other kids began to realize that I was athletically gifted, I was often chosen as team captain in volleyball, kickball, and softball. Despite my athletic abilities, there was always a part of me that wanted to hide, a part that felt inadequate. No matter how well I did, I’d look at the other kids and think, I wish I could be like everybody else.

The most important lesson I learned during my years at Chase Elementary School was how to make sure I wasn’t called on to read. I did my best to be nice to my teachers, even the one who told me that I could have been called worse. At first I sat in the back of the class and tried not to be noticed, but that made her make a point of calling on me. So I volunteered to erase the blackboard and became the good little boy in very visible ways. That worked—I didn’t get called on as much.

After I finished third grade, the school district zones changed and I was transferred to Fuerte Elementary School. I looked forward to going there because I no longer had to go to special-ed class or speech therapy. No one at the new school would know I was a retard. I still needed help with my reading and speech, but no one had to know that I’d had those classes at Chase, and I wasn’t about to say anything.

Unfortunately, some other kids also transferred from Chase to Fuerte, and the name-calling followed me. This time I started getting beat up a lot, mostly by the tough kids at the bus stop. If I didn’t fork over my lunch money to some bully or if I happened to bump into one of those kids in the lunch line, they’d pick a fight. I usually told them that I didn’t want a fight. I would say, “I know you can kick my ass, so why bother?” Then they would call me a “sissy-boy faggot.” They’d say, “See, we knew you were retarded.” That would really get me going. I would want to fight back, and of course I’d get my ass kicked.

Generally, I didn’t tell Mom what was going on. If my shirt was torn or I had grass stains on my knees, I’d tell her that I’d been playing on the jungle gym and had fallen or that I had been running and tripped. I would make up pretty believable stories. I didn’t want my mother to know what was going on, because I thought she might be ashamed of me. I already thought that I was a disappointment to her because I couldn’t keep up academically. My teachers never called Mom about the name-calling or the fights. I was on my own, especially because I didn’t have any close friends at school. Most of the other kids had a best friend, but I never did.

I got beat up often enough that it seemed like a lot to me. The boys picked the fights, and some of the girls cheered them on. I internalized all of it. I always thought that right prevailed, so since I got my butt kicked, I figured I must be wrong. They must be right to call me names and beat me up. Since I got my butt kicked, it had to be true that I was a sissy. Since I got beat up, I must be a bad person. Since I was a bad person, I must deserve it. If I didn’t deserve it, I would have won the fights. Such convoluted logic, but it made sense to me then, and it still makes sense to too many kids today.

The worst time I got my butt kicked was when I was ten. It was by this older blond kid, Charlie Brown (his real name). I have no idea why he wanted to fight me, but he told me to meet him at the bus stop one day after school. The way I remember it, we were there alone, and he punched me and slammed my head into the asphalt until I bled. I was embarrassed to go home because I was a mess and my shirt was torn.

I recently talked to Mom about my childhood, and one of the things we talked about was that fight. She said that she remembered it very clearly, because she was there watching. I was shocked to hear this, because I was sure it was just Charlie and me alone.

As my mother explained it to me, she had heard from someone in the neighborhood that there was going to be a fight down at the bus stop after school and that I was going to get beat up. By the time she got there, a crowd had already gathered to watch. It was mostly kids from school, but in the crowd, Mom spotted my father and my cousin. She ran home crying because she knew there was nothing she could do to stop it, and she couldn’t bear to stand there and see me get hurt.

When Mom told me this, it explained some things that I’d found very confusing about my memory of this fight. During the fight, I remember it felt like my father was the one throwing the punches. For years after, I had this awful feeling that Dad thought I deserved to get beat up, that he thought I was a sissy, and that he agreed with all the things the kids at school said about me.

Those feelings made perfect sense when I realized that my father was there watching. I remember now that he let it happen and that I knew at the time that he was there. He might as well have been the one throwing the punches. That he could be there and not help me was so terrible that I blocked it from my memory. All I remembered was the fight itself and feeling that my father thought I deserved what I got.

Why didn’t my dad at least put his arm around my shoulder, walk me home, and explain to me that I’d have been worse off if he’d interfered? I’ll never forget feeling so humiliated walking home by myself after the fight. Mom tells me that my dad and cousin came in a few minutes before I did. She was angry at them for not breaking up the fight, but she didn’t say anything because she was afraid. No one contradicted my father.

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about those kids who taunted me and beat me up, especially during the 1988 Olympic trials, which happened to coincide with my tenth high school reunion. Most of the kids from elementary school had gone on to the same high school I went to. I wanted to be there and see them. I wanted to say to them, “Yes, I am that sissy boy, but look what I’ve done.” Maybe I will if I’m still around for my twentieth.

I recently looked at some of my class pictures from elementary school. All I saw was just little kids, pictures of little kids. Little kids whose words and fists hurt.

Being beat up at elementary school—like being beaten by my dad—proved to be a big motivator. The name-calling and the humiliation pushed me to strive to be better than everyone. It made me angry, and I learned to focus most of that angry energy on my acrobatics and diving.

Unfortunately, I turned some of that angry energy on myself, which made my usual up-and-down moods even worse. As I approached my teens and my outlook on life got more and more bleak, I started thinking about killing myself.

B
Y THE TIME
I was twelve, I was one miserable kid, even though most of the time I managed to hide it, at least at school. If you asked the kids I went to school with what I was like, most of my classmates would probably describe me as happy-go-lucky. I got involved in things, like the student council in grammar school. When I ran for vice-president, at the end of my election speech, I said, “If you vote for me, I’ll flip for you.” Then I did a back flip, and although I felt that many of my classmates didn’t like me, I won the election.

Still, my self-perception was terrible. When I looked in the mirror, I saw an ugly kid who had a hard time reading. I felt terribly isolated and depressed, and was convinced that nobody could or would want to understand me. I played negative messages over and over again in my head: my natural parents didn’t want me; my adoptive parents don’t love me; I’m retarded; I’m ugly.

I got really caught up in feeling unloved, especially because I rarely saw my father. Even when he was around, he wasn’t interested in either of his children, and he absolutely didn’t understand me. My mom was really withdrawn herself, so she couldn’t help me. Sometimes, when I was particularly sullen, she’d ask me what was going on, but I couldn’t answer her, which made her crazy, because she and my dad weren’t talking, either. I felt like I could confide in no one.

The depression wasn’t consistent. It was like a roller coaster, but more often than not at that age, I was down in the dumps. A real low point came when I was twelve, right after I’d been having trouble with my knees and my mom took me to the doctor. He told me that I’d have to quit gymnastics, acrobatics, and dance because my knees couldn’t take the constant pounding. Many of the exhibitions Eleanor and I gave were in places that had concrete floors, which is how I’d damaged my knees. He’d allow me to continue diving because, unlike a hard surface, the diving board gives.

Even without the knee injury, it was getting to be more and more difficult doing both diving and gymnastics. With gymnastics, you’re supposed to land on your feet. With diving, you’re supposed to land on your head. After doing both sports for a while, I started having trouble landing right side up in my gymnastics routines. One of my tumbling runs was a front handspring/front somersault, and I kept landing on my face. I didn’t intend to dive into the mat face first, but after a couple of years on the diving board, my brain was geared to my landing on my head. I came away from that workout with a bloody nose.

So after more than ten years of classes and performances and competitions, I gave up acrobatics, gymnastics, and dance. I’d hoped to compete in gymnastics at the Olympics one day, but now that dream was gone. At twelve years old, I decided that I would kill myself. I went into my parents’ medicine cabinet and took a bunch of different pills, mostly aspirin and Ex-Lax. Then I took a razor blade out of the cabinet and started playing with it over my wrist. I started to bleed, but I didn’t go deep enough to cut any veins or arteries. It also turned out that I didn’t take enough of anything from the medicine cabinet to cause myself harm. I never told my parents about the suicide attempt, and they didn’t notice the missing medicine or the scratches on my wrists. Afterward, I was even more angry and depressed, because I didn’t see any way out.