In One Person

don’t speak up about it?” I asked the girl, who still looked like a boy.
    “That would be my fault,” Gee said.
    “What’s her name?” I asked the football players.
    All but one of them called out, “Gee!” The one who hadn’t spoken, the biggest one, was eating again; he was looking at his food, not at me, when I spoke to him.
    “What’s her name?” I asked again; he pointed to his mouth, which was full.
    “I’ll wait,” I told him.
    “He’s
not
on the faculty,” the big football player said to his teammates, when he’d swallowed his food. “He’s just a writer who lives in town. He’s some old gay guy who lives here, and he went to school here. He can’t tell us what to do—he’s not on the faculty.”
    “What’s her name?” I asked him.
    “Douche Bag?” the football player asked me; he was smiling now—so were the other football players.
    “You see why I’m ‘pretty angry,’ as you say, Gee?” I asked the fourteen-year-old. “Is this the guy who calls you Tampon?”
    “Yes—that’s him,” Gee said.
    The football player, the one who knew who I was, had stood up from the table; he was a very big kid, maybe four inches taller than I am, and easily twenty or thirty pounds heavier.
    “Get lost, you old fag,” the big kid said to me. I thought it would be better if I could get him to say the
fag
word to Gee. I knew I would have the fucker then; the dress code may have relaxed at Favorite River, but there were other rules in place—rules that didn’t exist when I’d been a student. You couldn’t get thrown out of Favorite River for saying
tampon
or
douche bag
, but the
fag
word was in the category of hate. (Like the
nigger
word and the
kike
word, the
fag
word could get you in trouble.)
    “Fucking
football
players,” I heard Gee say; it was something Herm Hoyt used to say. (Wrestlers are rather contemptuous about how tough football players
think
they are.) That young transgender-in-progress must have been reading my mind!
    “What did you say, you little fag?” the big kid said. He took a cheap shot at Gee—he smacked the heel of his hand into the fourteen-year-old’s face. It must have hurt her, but I saw that Gee wasn’t going to back down; her nose was starting to bleed when I stepped between them.
    “That’s enough,” I said to the big kid, but he bumped me with his chest. I saw the right hook coming, and took the punch on my left forearm—the way Jim
Somebody
had shown me, down that fourth-floor hall in the boxing room at the NYAC. The football player was a little surprised when I reached up and caught the back of his neck in a collar-tie. He pushed back against me, hard; he was a heavy kid, and he leaned all his weight on me—just what you want your opponent to do, if you have a halfway-decent duck-under.
    The dining-hall floor was a lot harder than a wrestling mat, and the big kid landed awkwardly, with all his weight (and most of mine) on one shoulder. I was pretty sure he’d separated that shoulder, or he had broken his collarbone—or both. At the time, he was just lying on the floor, trying not to move that shoulder or his upper arm.
    “Fucking
football
players,” Gee repeated, this time to the whole table of them. They could see her nose was bleeding more.
    “For the fourth time, what’s her name?” I asked the big kid lying on the floor.
    “Gee,” the douche-bag, tampon guy said. It turned out that he was a PG—a nineteen-year-old postgraduate who’d been admitted to Favorite River to play football. Either the separated shoulder or the broken collarbone would cause him to miss the rest of the football season. The academy didn’t expel him for the
fag
word, but he was put on probation. (Both Gee and I had hoped that her nose was broken, but it wasn’t.) The PG would be thrown out of school the following spring for using the
dyke
word, in reference to a girl who wouldn’t sleep with him.
    When I agreed to teach part-time at Favorite River, I said I would do so only on the condition that the academy make an effort to educate new students, especially the older PGs, on the subject of the liberal culture at Favorite River—I meant, of course, in regard to our acceptance of sexual diversity.
    But there in the dining hall, on that September day in 2007, I didn’t have anything more of an
educative
nature to say to the football players.
    My new protégée, Gee, however, had more to say to those jocks, who were still sitting at their table.