We're Dicks
The burning red light
Recently, a friend asked what it's like when I write. “It's like there's this blinding white light inside me, and the only way to let it out is with my words.” That's actually quite true. She asked me to write something where I opened it up entirely and let it all out.
One of my oldest friends, she's also the most gentle, “opening it all the way,” kind of scared me. Still, I was intrigued that she wanted to see it. “What if I write about something I love that can't possibly hurt anybody?”
That seemed like a workable compromise. I wrote about a movie I loved when I was a little boy, and why I loved it. It came out less blinding and more sweet and tender. I think the issue might be that she makes me sweet and tender, and has for a very long time.
I wasn't entirely honest, though. There is a blinding white light, and I'm getting pretty good at controlling it. However, there's also a burning red light that I can't control beyond “on” and “off,” although “off” may be hard to do once I've pressed “on.”
When I was in high school, I played football. In Mississippi, this wasn't something a fella had a choice in. In junior high, we had a trick play where I carried the ball, and because I was so much bigger than everybody else, I got to score some touchdowns.
In high school, the new coach didn't like trick plays, and the boys we played against were catching up to me pound for pound, even though they weren't nearly as strong. Does that sound like bragging? Sometimes I avoid writing about that because it sounds like bragging.
From the line I came, and to the line I returned. We were a very small school, so I played offense, defense, and specialty teams. Coach Clark enjoyed using my body like a juggernaut or a bludgeon. Were he alive, he'd admit to it and laugh. I was beginning to have doubts.
In high school, I can’t remember if it was Neil Brown or Mike Shepherd who came up with the name “mules” for the linemen.
At first, I don't think we had a bullshit second definition of the name. Everybody, including the coaches, knew what it meant.
Coach Clark liked putting stickers on our helmets. A Football sticker for touchdowns, stars for good plays, and skulls for tough hits. If you hit somebody so hard that they had to be helped off the field, that was called a “pack-off,” and you got a skull.
In those days, you couldn't get pre-cut stickers. The team manager made them from vinyl, self-adhesive shelf paper. He was pretty good with a pair of scissors. He cut out a Mule for our helmets, and a mule with dumbbells for me.
In the early eighties, St Andrew's Episcopal High School jargon held that a “mule” was an euphemism for the male sex organ. We were dicks. We were dicks to everyone. We thought we deserved it because we never got the recognition we deserved. Without us, nobody was making touchdowns. That's just a fact of life. When guys scored, the crowd cheered, and the girls put lipstick kisses on their sweaty faces. We never got that. We got dirt, sweat, and bruises. Coaches always say, “That's teamwork.” Maybe it is, but it's also soul-crushing bullshit.
A couple of times, Butch and Duke, who did carry the ball (not their real names), brought us pizza to the locker room. The coach never asked them to; they did it on their own.
A writer for the Clarion Ledger interviewed Neil Brown about the mules. He said we were the mules because mules were hard workers, and so were we. Such bullshit. We were in the paper, though.
In the years to come, I learned that we called ourselves the mules, but what we were was bullies—maybe not me, but some of the others, and certainly me sometimes. I enjoyed being the biggest, strongest kid anybody knew. It didn't last, but it was fun.
Without revealing too much, just because a boy comes from an upper-middle-class family doesn't mean it was a happy family. Nothing that happened at school was as much of a determinant of a boy's behavior as what happened at home. That's all I'm gonna say about that. Cruelty flows downhill. It flowed downhill onto some of the mules.
“Campbell! Are you in love?” Mike Shepherd was not subtle at all. I’m not sure how he came up with this idea. September Moore was new at school. We were buddies. Honestly, I treated her more like a puppy. There were two girls I liked. Neither one was her. One girl, Dan Rose, would invite me into his office, offer me a sip from his flask, and tell me the parable about the man who found a pearl of great value, meaning Paige Sibley. He caught us holding hands under the desk twice.
“You gonna bang her?” Mike asked. “I hadn't thought about it.” I said. That was my honest reply. Protesting that I didn't like her like that was rebuffed.
I decided that I should at least be nice to her instead of treating her like a mascot. In those days, I built plastic models. I gave her one. It wasn't actually a dozen roses, but as I wasn’t actually trying to bang her, I figured that was pretty good.
A dance was coming up. I had a plan about who I was gonna ask. It wasn't September. You don't need to know who i was gonna ask before disaster struck. I'm not sure what happened next. Maybe somebody asked if she was gonna go with me when I asked. I never found out.
What I did find out was that she had missed two classes because she was hiding in the bathroom, afraid to face me to say “no”.
Had I asked her and she said “no,” even if she was the girl I liked, it might have made me a little sad, but she'd never know it. Boys get rejected all the time. Boyd gets rejected all the time. It's not a challenge to my manhood. Sometimes the shoe was on the other foot, too.
I wasn't sad. I wasn't concerned. I was mad. Every girl in school was on her side, and I hadn't done a goddamn thing. I wasn't even gonna ask her! How do you express mad with a girl though? Can you even assert yourself and be a gentleman?
The whole thing was remarkably entertaining to the other mules. One of them gave me a card the size of a gentleman's calling card. “Give her that!” He said.
“Why?” I said.
“Because it'll be funny! Who cares what a bitch thinks?” He said.
On the card, it said, “You are cordially invited to go fuck yourself.”
I found her in the back of the chemistry lab with two other girls, consoling her, I imagined, even though I hadn't actually done anything. I tapped her on the shoulder, gave her the card, and turned heel-to-toe, walking out sternly. If I hadn't done anything anybody could judge me for before, I had then. We didn't speak for a year.
In the year we didn't speak, the mules and other dicks taught me how bullies treat girls. First off, you don't soil your own nest. There were several high schools around town, and they all had girls. I’m not entirely proud of my year with the Mississippi versions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It did teach me one thing. That's not how I actually felt about women. My future would hold some encounters with Ophelia and the Roman version of Cleopatra, but that wasn't really me either.
The following year, September started dating boys for real. I wasn't mad anymore. Even though she cut her hair, she was still the school puppy. I started seeking paths where we could be friends again.
She started keeping time with one of the boys who started this business of driving to South Jackson like a pack of wolves, so we could harvest blondes with gigantic hair like they were sheep. Worse than that, she seemed to really like him.
I don't know how to explain what happened next. It’s not like my hands were clean. I participated in these raids pretty often. As the Mules transformed into the Travelers, bros before hos was the only rule. I could tell I was changing, though. One night, when we were out harvesting hos, I told Mike I was going home.
“What's your problem, man?”
“You just don't get it, do you?” I said.
One day, after watching the school puppy flirt with the school’s head womanizer, something inside me broke. It just broke. As he walked away with his friends, I whipped him around by his shoulder, lifted him up by his shirt, and pinned him against a tree. Three of his friends jumped on my back. Stupid. What did they think they were gonna do to me?
I pressed my forehead against his. With his feet dangling above the ground, he couldn’t move. “Don't. Hurt. Her.” A pregnant pause to make sure he understood me, pressing my forehead harder into his, would my skull break before his? Then I dropped him. His friends whisked him away. Charles Wright ran to my side.
“Are you ok, dude?”
“Yeah, I think so.”I'd let the Red light out before. One night, the voices in my brother's head told him to kill me, and the Red light came on to defend myself. This was different, though. I was afraid of myself.
It was stupid. Although he started before me, and he was better at it than I was, we both spent a year being mule dicks to girls we didn't even know. Maybe I was as mad at myself as I was at him. Maybe he regretted it too. All I could think about was that even though she wasn't the girl I liked, or even close to it, I didn't want him doing to her what we did every weekend to girls from Prep, Pearl, and South Jackson.
There were other times when I let out the burning red light, but I'm reaching the upper limit of what people will read on Substack. Ask me about my trip to New York to see the original cast of Phantom of the Opera sometime.
Boys go through many phases as they grow up. Everybody has a red light inside them. Mine burns hotter than most.
For many years, Doug Draper was my psychologist. Although he didn't have that degree or ordination, he was also one of my pastors. Doug explained that you don't get just a white light. The universe always seeks balance. Yin and yang. However powerful the white light is, that's how destructive the red light can be. He didn't feel like I needed help controlling the red light. Neither did I. Turning it off when it's done its job was usually not too difficult. I didn't like it, though.
The internet can be filled with horrible people. One time, a woman was jealous of another woman, so she released the address where her twelve-year-old daughter went to school on 4chan. When I confronted her about it, her response was, “Call the cops. Prove I did it.”
Not realizing i’d come prepared with every painful thing that ever happened to her, I focused the red light on her for an hour. Impressed with my cruelty, somebody recorded it. You can still find copies in the seldom-lit corners of the internet. Although it's embarrassing, I don't apologize. You don't mess with somebody's child, no matter how jealous you are.
She was right. I couldn't prove she posted the dox on 4chan, even though she told people she did it. It wasn't hard getting the dox off 4chan, and her IP was banned as a child was involved, but I would have my pound of flesh. I control the red light, even if it doesn't seem like it. Turning it off is always under my control.
