The boy in the picture is me, somewhere around kindergarten, in a yellow shirt and a fringed vest my mother must have been proud of. Look at the teeth. Every kid on my street did. By the time that photo was taken the neighborhood had already gone to work on me, and the names came in a steady rotation: Teeth. Sabertooth. Bucky. Bucky Beaver. Lips, because the teeth pushed my lips out and made them look bigger than they were. There was even a whole routine about my birth. I came into the world in a red Valiant parked out in front of the hospital, a family story that should have been mine to tell, and the neighborhood turned it into a joke that the doctor had caught me by the lip. There were more names than those. Some I've honestly forgotten. One I never will.
They called me N-----lips. They took the ugliest word in the American language, hooked it onto a little boy's face, and threw it at me in the street. I didn't have the vocabulary then to say what was happening, but I understood it in my body. They were telling me that looking like a Black person was the worst thing a kid could look like, and that I would do as the stand-in. I learned what racism was the way a lot of people learn it, from the receiving end, years before I could have defined it. It didn't make me hate the people that word was invented to wound. It did the opposite. It put me, at five or six years old, on their side of the line.
So when I got to Orchard Park High School I already knew how the machine worked. In my last OPHS post I drew the map the way everybody remembers it: Quakers on one side, Gaunches on the other, and a middle ground where a mutt like me could wander back and forth between them. A reunion photo that crossed my feed this week reminded me that the map left something out. The real power in that building didn't belong to either tribe. It belonged to a hybrid, a creature out of Greek mythology roaming the main hallway in a letter jacket over an Izod. The Chimera had the body of a lion, the head of a goat and the tail of a serpent. Ours had the shoulders of the varsity locker room, the bank balance of the hill, and a tail with a sting in it.
That creature was the continental divide at OPHS. On one side were the kids who had both the muscle and the money: the boys from the right streets who also started on Friday nights, so the coaches loved them, the teachers forgave them and the town's parents had already pictured them as sons-in-law. On the other side was everybody else, and from where the Chimera stood, everybody else was material. The Quakers alone could be snobs and the jocks alone could be loud, but put the two together and you got something that could decide who got laughed at, and make it stick.
I was material. High school didn't invent the teasing. It codified it. The neighborhood names followed me into those halls, and "Bucky" became official, a name I hated, used precisely because they knew I hated it. Then the class will came out in the '84 yearbook. That's the line above my kindergarten face. Period 5 Media willed Bucky a pair of rose colored glasses. Two jokes in one line, one about the teeth and one about the way I saw the world, printed, bound and handed to every senior. That's the Chimera's signature move: a joke that looks harmless and turns out to be permanent.
The Chimera had institutional backing, too. In tenth grade I was on JV football. That fall I went in for an emergency appendectomy and missed two weeks of school, and when I got back to my locker it had been broken into and left hanging open. My new spikes were gone. They'd cost about eighty dollars, which was the first big purchase I'd ever made with my own money. None of my teammates knew anything, of course. I did my own detective work, studying everybody's feet at practice, and the trail led up to the varsity. I took it to the coaches. They didn't care. No search, no questions, no consequences, just a kid back from surgery standing in his socks while the program closed ranks around its starters. I quit football after that. The same crowd had been using second-stringers like me as tackling dummies at practice anyway, so I didn't lose much except the shoes and whatever faith I had that the adults were keeping score.
This week a dozen of them turned up around a fire pit, grinning, captioned with how much they've appreciated each other for decades. I believe them. A creature like that is very good at appreciating itself. Someone said on my last post that at reunions it's like the old labels never existed, and I think that's true for the people who handed the labels out. The ones who got stuck with them remember with unusual clarity. Same ridge, same rain, same school, and the memories run downhill in opposite directions.
I've spent my working life with stone, steel, salvaged scrap and living plants, and every one of those materials has taught me the same lesson: they carry memory. A fieldstone pulled from a farm wall still holds the frost heaves of a hundred winters. A fork welded into a sturgeon still remembers every meal it served. Hammer a dent out of a sheet of steel and it may look flat again, but the grain has been worked, and that spot will never behave quite like the rest of the piece. Kids are like that. The ones doing the hammering move on by Monday and forget by graduation. The kid on the receiving end carries it for fifty years, and it shows up at odd moments: a flinch when somebody uses a nickname, a reflex to expect the people in charge to look the other way, a habit of bracing before you walk into a room full of people who all seem to know each other. You build a whole life on top of it, a good one even, and then a photo of a fire pit shows up on your phone and you're fifteen and standing in your socks again. That isn't weakness, and it isn't failing to let go. It's how memory works when you're young and it's what gets done to you. The cruelty was casual for them and structural for you, and that difference is the whole story.
Here is what the hammering made out of me. When you've been mocked your whole childhood for things you were born with, your teeth, your face, the way your mind works, you come out the other side with a bone-deep understanding that nobody should be judged for what they are. I took that understanding everywhere. When racism showed up in my own household, I pushed back against it. I've accepted people as people my whole life, and for thirty-five years I've tried to put that belief into the ground in permanent public work meant for everybody who walks past it, whoever they are. The kid who heard that slur aimed at him in the street grew up to be a man who wanted no other kid to hear it.
Which is why the last six years have cut the way they have. As a grown man I've been called a racist, a bigot, an antisemite, a Nazi, and worse, things I won't repeat here, by people who decided what I was before they ever asked. The labels went up fast, the institutions repeated them, and almost nobody stopped to check. If that sounds familiar, it should. It's the neighborhood and the locker room again, the same machinery with bigger words, and it lands on the same dent.
This morning an old friend, one I found again this fall after more than twenty years, sent me three verses from Proverbs after we'd talked all of this through:
"He that reproveth a scorner getteth to himself shame: and he that rebuketh a wicked man getteth himself a blot. Reprove not a scorner, lest he hate thee: rebuke a wise man, and he will love thee. Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser: teach a just man, and he will increase in learning." (Proverbs 9:7–9)
I've read them a dozen times since. They're the best description I've found of what ties the kids on my street, the Chimera in the hallway and the people who've spent six years telling the world what I am. They're scorners, and a scorner doesn't change because you finally find the right words. Every argument you hand him comes back as another blot on you. So this isn't a rebuke, and it isn't written to them. It's written to the other readers that passage talks about, the ones with enough wisdom to look at a picture of a five-year-old and a line in a yearbook and draw their own conclusions. It's also not lost on me which old friends are which. A dozen classmates appreciated each other around a fire pit this week. One friend I hadn't seen in two decades heard the whole story and sent me scripture.
I'm not asking anyone for an apology at sixty. Most of the people who did these things probably don't remember, and that's the point. But I'll say this plainly: I'd rather have a conversation than a grudge. If any of you read this and something in it rings a bell, from either side of the divide, my door is open. We're all old enough now to sit down around the same fire and tell the truth about what it was like. And as for the rose colored glasses, I've worn them for thirty-five years building stone walls, gardens and sculpture in public places. They turned out to be the best tool in the shop.