“I don’t care what they call me,” he said confidentially, “so long as they don’t call me what they used to call me in school.”
Ralph was faintly interested.
“What was that?”
The fat boy glanced over his shoulder, then leaned toward Ralph.
He whispered.
“They used to call me Piggy!”
—- William Golding from Lord of the Flies published in 1954
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Me too.
I have no memory of exactly when it started, but I know who started it.
Bruce did.
And from whenever he started it, to when I was about fifteen, my older brother called me a pig every chance he could. When he wasn’t saying it directly in my face, he would do things like make piggish grunting noises or simply push his nose up if I happened to look at him. He was relentless. Especially at meals. He would do this thing… where he would feign hunger, playacting like he was me as we waited for the food. He made it clear that this is what I looked like to him. I was a pig waiting to be fed and when the food came, he would dig in like the pig I was, glancing at me to show me the food on his/my face. I couldn’t touch my food without him making some comment about how I was eating it, or going to eat it.
Like a pig.
Bruce has always been very intelligent, with an exceptional ability to focus. At the time I was too distraught to even wonder about his intent. My adult self now sees it as like he was experimenting on me or something. Testing his ability to have me do whatever it was he wanted me to do. But for little boy me it was nothing less than psychological torture, and by the time I finally stood up to him and made it stop, the deed was done. Bruce had succeeded. I was conditioned.
I truly saw myself as a fat kid. Like Piggy.
And just like Piggy in Lord of the Flies, I wasn’t really overweight by that much. At age ten, I was far from what could be called obese, or even very fat. I was pudgy and not very well coordinated but not truly fat. Every photo I’ve seen from those days confirms this.
I remember that summer after my tenth birthday my Dad signed me up for little league football. It was 1969 and across the country dramatic events were afoot. A brand new and modern generation was standing up for their rights and defining their own culture for themselves. From the Stonewall riots in June, to Woodstock in August. Young people in general, and people of all ages who lived in ways that the folks of my little corner of midwestern cul-de-sac America didn’t understand or accept, were asserting themselves, “doing their own thing” and changing the world.
I was a ten-year-old “fat kid”, struggling to please my athlete father who I’m sure had no idea what kind of hell I would experience the way little league football was run in those days in Rochester, Minnesota. He certainly had no idea that his other son was doing all he could to make me see myself as fat. As a pig.
More on that when the story is to be…
To be continued…
