"If everyone is finished," Mrs. McKenna
announced to her third grade class, "you can open your cards."
The 25 or so eager third graders ripped the paper bags from the front of their desks. Each
bag was stiff from dried glue and smelled of the permanent ink that had been used to write
their names over misshapen hearts clumsily cut from bright red construction paper.
"Knock knock." "Who's there? .... Orange." "Orange who? ....
Orange you gonna be my Valentine? .... I haite (sic) you fatso!!!"
I stared blankly at the valentine, tears threatening.
It wasn't the first time that year I had been called fatso, although most of them just
called me "Fat Matt."
I was a good kid, from a rather well-to-do family. I was outgoing and always participated
in my classes. But after the third grade, things began to change. My peers and I were
becoming more and more aware of our differences. I was overweight, didn't have an interest
in playing sports and was in the "gifted" classes. Three strikes, I was out.
At age 10, my life took another unexpected turn. My family in just a few short years, lost
everything-edging into a downward spiral that didn't stop until we found ourselves braving
the winter in an old camper shell in a campground alongside the American River. Sheets of
plastic covered the holes where windows were missing.
The true nature of the human condition showed its face as distant family members and
"tried-and-true" family friends not only turned their backs on us, but went so
far as to pretend they were not home when we called or visited.'
School was sporadic at best over the next two years. Most of our time was spent trying to
hunt down ways to get food, clothes, the bare necessities of life. But more often than
not, I saw the cruelty of people.
One day, I was using the phone outside the front office of the campground when two men
pulled up in a jeep, took the phone from me and began yelling and flashing police badges.
I was terrified. They told me their young children had seen me going through their tent
and threatened to take me to jail. I begged for them to let me get my mother, swearing
through my loud sobs that I never even went past the tent area.
They told me I was lying, and if I didn't confess now I was going to jail and would never
see my family again. My family was everything ... it was the only thing.
I told them I did it. I was searched and told to get in the jeep. I was taken back to my
family, and they sat helpless as the officer told them people like us should be locked up.
At 14, we were living in a small apartment over a garage, and I went back to school. My
weight edging toward 160, as well as shabby, secondhand clothing, made me an instant
target.
I was sent to the office several times where the nurse told me I smelled bad or that my
clothes were not up to the school's standards.
I entered junior high and encountered a new dilemma. Hormones were beginning to stir
inside my young body. I found myself daydreaming about classmates: holding their hands,
first kisses. But the classmates I was thinking about on the long bus rides home ... were
boys.
I became quickly acquainted with a new set of names-fag, queer, gayrod-words that still
make me wonder if those who used them actually understood them.
One afternoon, after the principal watched several boys shove me around and call me names,
he summoned me to his office. He sat, perched on the corner of the desk, his sharp eyes
peering down,Ward Cleaver-like.
"You need to stop acting queer, Matthew. It would be in your best interest that if
you are that way, you make sure no one ever finds out. It's not a good thing to be."
I walked to my class in a daze, shaking uncontrollably and wondering what was the quickest
and most painless way to die.
My grades plummeted-a line of Fs all the way down the page. Teachers' comments took up
attached pages, all voicing their concern. They wanted to make me repeat the seventh
grade, but instead made me sign an agreement that my grades would stay at a certain level
in eighth grade in exchange for letting me advance.
For the first semester I maintained a B average, then a C, than Ds the last half of the
year. My only As were in my drama class. It was the one place where I could forget the
taunts, forget the fights and the cruel practical jokes and step outside of myself. As I
performed scenes, read lines and became someone else for a few moments each day, I found
some peace.
We were still standing fast on the poverty line as I was about to begin high school. I was
struggling to fit into clothes from two years earlier as my weight again began to
increase. I begged my mother not to make me go to school any longer. She finally agreed to
home study. After two weeks of dealing with the counselor I was assigned who treated us as
most everyone else had, my mother agreed that if I didn't want to return to school, I
didn't have to.
I faced the world from behind closed doors still viewing people as cruel and
untrustworthy. I held onto that belief through my early 20s.
I moved to Sacramento in 1987. The apartment complex that I lived in was near CSUS, and I
often sat in my room, watching as people my age made their way to and from school. Their
arms were loaded with books, their lights burning late into the night as they studied..,
in a way, I envied them. But college was the big league--full of subjects I could never
begin to understand.
I was a 300-pound gay man with an eighthgrade education. Kids pointed and laughed at me in
the store, people threw things from passing cars, yelling names at me. Why would I want to
go back to school? The place that still haunted my dreams, the place where people would
laugh at me.
Just before my 28th birthday, I reached yet another low point in my life. I had left my
job, I was suffering through my second deep depression in four years, and I was quickly
finding myself grasping at the last frayed strands of my rope.
My stepmother asked me if I wanted to take classes with her at City College. I
automatically recoiled. "That's way over my head," I recited my mantra. She gave
me a surprised look. "If I can do it, you aren't going to have any problem," she
laughed. She spent the next month convincing me that I had nothing to lose.
Having worked on a newspaper before, I signed up for two journalism classes. For the first
two weeks I fought panic attacks every time I squeezed into the ridiculously small seat in
the back row of the classroom and kept my gaze Iow, hoping to remain overlooked.
By the end of the semester, I was sitting in the front of the class ... asking questions.
The next semester I was working on the school newspaper as opinions editor. I went on to
be features editor, web designer and won several awards from the Journalism Association of
Community Colleges for my writing.
I am now entering my fourth semester at City College with a 3.88 GPA and a goal of a
double major in journalism and theater arts. The place I was once convinced was over my
head has become a source of self-empowerment.
Yes, I am still fat; yes, I am still gay. But now those differences propel me forward and
will never again hold me back. |
