Kids

Kids are probably the most oppressed people because people don’t really know

they’re there. I didn’t even know I was thinking when I was a kid because no one

ever talked to me as if that were happening. So I was alone with my knowledge. A

lost cause. I feel like the revolution I have been having my entire life is rooted in my

childhood. The unseen land. I’m looking up around me on a plane right now and all I

see is these stupid movies. I have never come back from the insult of childhood.

People talking to you as if you weren’t there moving you around like a little prop.

When the woman asks me if I want a drink Ma’am I get quietly furious because I am

not a ma’am. I feel I am a sir. If I say that she will act as if I am crazy. How dare I

know what I am. Particularly because I am both older (than her) and unconventional

looking. It seems that unless I am on teevee and someone is framing me as

something I am nothing and just something crazy on a plane, not young, not a kid,

but old and I tell you it is the same and I am mad since childhood. I was a boy when I

was a kid and no one believed me. You don’t have to be a boy who was born a girl to

be mad at what you got. I remember being forced to eat warm sweet squash both at

home and at school. I gagged. I sat there as the vegetable grew cold and the world

darkened outside the kitchen window. There is a movie called Kids and it is really

about a boy. There is a movie called Boyhood and everyone thinks its so wonderful

and everyone female in it is stupid and everyone male is great and even when they

are not great there is time in a movie called Boyhood for the men to become great

because it is a movie about men. The boy who was shot in the playground Tamar

Rice is like me. I am not black and I know it would be different for me if I was black

but the thing about a black child is that you can shoot him and in that I identify with

that child. You could shoot me. I’m thinking what I loved in childhood was archery.

All that violence pulling in my chest. My lucky orange arrows and my lucky silver

ones. Screaming at day camp get the silver ones, get the orange. And the counselors

being mad at me for getting all the other kids going. Once in a while I would feel very

strong and convinced when I was young and I noticed that that pissed off adults

more than when I was dumb and sad. When I was convinced and excited there was

really something wrong. That loud masculine girl really knows what she wants. She

must be disturbed. As a result (and how hard it was to be this way) I gave up really

easy when I was a kid. I wanted a guitar so bad but my parents probably felt I was

kidding. Why would Eileen want a guitar. They got me a toy guitar that said Wyatt

Earp. I was about twelve and the baby guitar embarrassed me and so when we had

company I sought to transform the embarrassment and I suggested that I do my

Elvis Presley imitation. It’s what I did with my friends. When we were all over my

house and my mother was out I would get my friends to have a competition lip

synching songs and of course these were my records so I ran upstairs and got my

little Tyrolean hat with a feather in its band and I would put on a Bobby Darin

record and sing mack the knife snapping my fingers and doing my singer dance. I

always won these games and I don’t think anyone minded because I was good to

watch. I believe. But my mother wouldn’t let me do Elvis at Christmas when the

Dunns were over because all their three girls were normal (they weren’t. The older

one was tall and masculine and became a nurse and joined the army and went to

Vietnam.) But that was my mother’s fear that they were normal and we weren’t. I

was obviously not normal and my mother’s lifetime fear was anyone discovering

that she was not normal. I remember her confession after dinner once: I always felt

weird. We knew she did. We were her kids. But she was an adult and had to perfect

the show and so I couldn’t sing by the tree with my shitty guitar. And so I am singing

now. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Eileen Myles