I was a fag. So were all my friends back in middle school.

Only one or two of us were bi or gay. But to everyone else in the school, we were fags. Every single one of us. And we didn’t give a fuck.

It was true Darwin, our middle school. 1990s suburban America. It was animal. Social selection. There’d be regular ass-kickings. Kids in the hallways kicked, punched from behind. Group beatings in bathrooms. Faces in toilets. Faces slammed into lockers. Wedgies. Purple nurples. Ears flicked. Seats yanked out.

We rarely participated in such barbarism or fought or picked on others, but we would fight back when necessary, and we’d mostly lose, catch a beatdown.

Because we were fags.

Spazzes. Weirdos. Kids with fucked up haircuts, kids who wore out of fashion clothes, shopped at Goodwill stores and changed clothes when our clothes somehow became in fashion.

We were fags.

We read tattered secondhand sci-fi books, horror books by Stephen King, and we wrote shitty poetry, graffitied dicks and balls, tags, band names and haikus on bathroom stalls and played in shitty basement bands full of out-of-tune, distorted guitars, off-tempo drumming and shrieking tone deaf vocals; our punk covers so horrendous they’d make Kurt Cobain want to shoot himself again.

Fags.

This was before school shootings, mass shootings were a regular occurrence.

Probably one or two of us would have shot people, given the chance, like probably that balding asshole, beer gut vice principal or the burning breath teacher who verbally abused us, turned his back on the bullying.

Or maybe we’d have blasted a jock or two, shot up a football or basketball game, if we had the opportunity, had the idea, but it didn’t really register as a thing back then.

Like, why would we? We’d rather hang at home, smoke weed, strum guitars, and play video games, shoot people in video games.

At least in video games you can shoot people and not have to go get beaten and buttfucked in jail, or not have to shoot yourself afterwards.

Plus, you can hit the reset button, play a new game and keep shooting people ... Video games are definitely better...

And you might be thinking that we never got laid, because we were fags. But we did. Maybe because even the shittiest garage and basement bands attract groupies. Maybe because girls liked “bad boys” and weirdos.

All of us had sex at young ages, but the girls we fucked weren’t cheerleaders, but were also fags, girl fags, girl versions of fags, girl weirdos and potheads. Girls with limps. Girls with big tits but small asses. Girls with small tits and big asses. Girls with speech impediments. Girls who wrote poetry and cut themselves.

Almost every girl we knew had been raped by the jocks. The jocks were always raping people, sexually harassing girls. One girl with big tits, at her old school, had a running back after her, constantly cornering her, ordering her to show him her tits and finally the running back tried to tear off her shirt in the hallway.

And he got away with it too, because he and his parents complained of racism and because he could play football...

The majority of the jocks’ sexual attacks happened at parties, usually to a girl drunk on a sofa, getting raped and Bill Cosby shit.

In retrospect, the jocks probably deserved some kinder, gentler, more anodyne version of Columbine, like maybe getting blasted with paintball guns or tasers or mace instead of bullets. They were rapists, the jocks, after all, and not disputable, questionable rapists like Kobe Bryant, but real Harvey Weinstein rapists, and serial date rapists allowed to rape because they excelled at sports.

That’s how it was.

They were the jocks.

And we were the fags...

The biggest fag of us all was Lenard.

Literally, he was big, 6’9 in 8th grade. He was a German American, who was that sort of special German, northern European, Aryan caveman mix of fat and muscle and stout, Alpine snow-white skin, crystal blue eyes.

Lenard could have been one of our enemies, he could have been a jock, he could have been one of them, if not for his personality.

He was too laid back. Sensitive. Liked to read big bulky brick-sized books like “Shogun” and listen to The Cure and Depeche Mode and didn’t care much for aggressive hip hop or popularity or the latest clothes, fashions, trends. And he didn’t have a fade or a flattop. Instead he had shoulder length dark wispy hair, parted down the middle, mutton chop sideburns and wore solid black shirts and jeans and heavy, murky eye liner.

That’s why he fit in with us. That’s why he was a fag. Because we were the same. We freaks, posers, nerds, romantics and misfits. We formed a union, were a conglomeration of fags.

Aside from Lenard, none of us were physical specimens. We were short, chunky, uncoordinated, skinny, zit-faced. And definitely none of us could have been, like, maybe a pro athlete, except for Lenard. He could have. He certainly had the physical build.

He was the only one of us who wasn’t bullied, beaten on by the jocks, and when he was with us, in the cafeteria, wherever, the jocks stayed away. Given his intimidating size, they wanted no part of him.

That changed, though, in gym class. Like us, Lenard wouldn’t regularly participate and would sneak off with the rest of us fags, running off into the woods behind school, like escaped convicts, to smoke cigarettes and sip on alcohol stolen from someone’s parents.

But, and I don’t know why, he finally decided to join a basketball game in gym class and, perhaps out of a sense of obligation, we joined him on the court, forming a team of freaks and fags and we were matched up against the jocks.

Of course the jocks ran us ragged, most of us- but not Lenard.

We just threw the ball to him, and he’d chuck it right over them, dunked several times. I think he’d played basketball before at the school he’d transferred in from, because the game came easy to him, and he moved way swifter than I’d expect of a dude his size, all juking and jiving, dancing with grace, almost like a ballerina.

One of the jocks, also tall, but still shorter than Lenard, this crew cut, brace face fuck, named Allen, didn’t appreciate being shown up, didn’t like being dunked on by a ponytailed sasquatch of a fag. Especially one wearing eye liner...

Following Lenard’s second effortless dunk over Allen, and the ball inadvertently hitting Allen upside the corner of his head, Allen barked curses and shoved Lenard and challenged him to a fight, not there, on the court, but said how Lenard had to meet him after school, at the track, behind the bleachers... 3:45 PM.

Lenard pushed him back, knocking Allen off balance, and responded laconically, “I’m there!” and stalked off...

I hated Allen. We all did. He’d been a fag before, two years prior, played drums for one of our shitty bands, and was fucking awesome, was like a taller, younger Lars, but when he’d hit puberty, he metamorphosized into an asshole. A jock. He’d joined the dark side.

Still, as much as I disliked him, part of me worried for him. With his brace face, he shouldn’t have been fighting, and certainly shouldn’t be trying to fight a gorilla like Lenard. I figured Lenard would bash open his face and I could envision the metal wires of Allen’s braces mangled, his face a bloody car wreck, or maybe Lenard might just rip him limb by limb.

That challenge, that gym class, was in the morning, and after that, the rest of the day, we didn’t mention it, talk about it, but we all knew it would happen. It was a tacit understanding. It was inevitable.