The Yellow Sweater
When I turned twelve, something clicked inside me. Perhaps it was my gay biological clock, perhaps it was the beginning of my rebellion. I’d had the same bowl and bangs haircut since I was old enough to toddle down to the barber shop where, invariably, I was treated to the hunting stories and racist diatribes of other customers. Dad got his hair cut once a week, while my mother visited the Beauty Bar once every other week. Whoever ascribed vanity and maintenance as female qualities hasn’t taken a good hard look at the appearance regimen of men who’ve done time in our nation’s military.
Perhaps I was simply tired of looking like a Little Rascal. For whatever reason, I announced to my mother that I wanted Shirley to cut my hair. The benefit of having an overcommitted, workaholic, save?the?world kind of father is that he is often oblivious to the minutiae of your daily life. This can work to one’s benefit.
I fantasized about this haircut for weeks, cutting and pasting hundreds of photographs from GQ and Esquire onto the walls of my bedroom. The whole mannish boy thing was working my nerves. My locks had suffered far too many butcheries, and my mother usually responded by saying "He makes you look like a jack?o?lantern." The spinning blue and red stripes of the barber’s pole were about to be relegated to memory.
And not a moment too soon. I’d discovered the Smiths, Depeche Mode, and the Cure. I was free, if only in scalp. Doesn’t freedom begin at the top and work its way down? It was 1985, the heart of the Reagan era, so those trickle down theories were ubiquitous.
The reception at school was mixed. Naturally, I told anyone who would listen that I was going to have my hair "styled." Mostly I told the girls, who understood such things. For good measure, I mentioned it to several of my guy friends, most of whom looked down at their shoes and said "Oh, what does that mean?" I probably made it sound like I was going in for purple and gold extensions, when in actuality, all I wanted was a part and a bit of layering. The reception of my big hair news was well received, with the exception of one girl.
I wanted to slap Elsie in the face hard. During marching band practice, I’d confided in her the most important development of my life so far and she’d responded with "Are you a boy or a girl?"
I didn’t slap Elsie. Instead, she slapped me. I called her a "fucking bitch" in front of her all?girl clique, the coterie into which I so desperately wanted passage. She gave me an anemic half?slap, then held her hand in the air as if it were bloody. "I’m so sorry," she squeaked. "Did I hurt you?"
"You’re gonna have to hit a lot harder if you want it to hurt," I coached her.
Mom was in many ways responsible for my recent interest in fashion. She’d taken the entire family to Mrs. Spice, the Color Me Beautiful woman, where a dozen of us took turns being evaluated in her basement.
When Mrs. Spice got me in that chair, she held swatches of color against my face, then told my family which ones worked.
"Kirk is a classic Autumn," she said.
That explains everything, I thought.
She held purples and browns against me, saying "Oh, Kirk! Star!" if a color was especially compatible with my skin tones. At first I wasn’t all that thrilled to be an Autumn. It meant that I was stuck with, as my mother put it, "diarrhea green and doody brown." Mrs. Spice reassured me that Ronald Reagan had made it okay for people to wear brown suits again. This came as some relief.
She handed me a small plastic booklet of fabric swatches, which I took with me everywhere, like a prayer book. I told my mother that from that point forward, I would only wear season?appropriate colors. Furthermore, my church clothes had to go because Mrs. Spice had disallowed me to wear white and blue shirts. "Cream," she cooed. "Oyster. Beige." She made it sound illicit.
This was an example of a little bit of knowledge being dangerous. I proceeded to break my friends into skin tone groupings—yellow and blue. I gave them advice on what to wear and even scolded teachers for wearing scarves that were all wrong for them.
"You’re just making it worse," I said to my science teacher. "Trust me on this."
Shortly after the girls at the Beauty Bar styled my hair, Mom agreed to take me shopping at Valley View, the new mall in Roanoke. I mostly wanted to go into girl stores, like the Limited. I couldn’t imagine why they didn’t have men’s clothes. Mom tried to steer me toward boy stores where I could get measured for khakis and oxford cloth shirts, but I was relentless.
Outside Chess King, I spotted it—a neon yellow cotton knit sweater. It was the last one, so they had to take it off the mannequin. I put it on and stood in front of my mother.
"It’s my color," I told her.
Mom looked at me in the sweater, tilted her head, then grimaced. "It’s yellow," she said.
"Mom, it’s my color. Look!" I held a swatch of lemon yellow against the sweater. If it had been a fire, that sweater would have been forty degrees hotter. Mom bought it anyway, and I proceeded to rhapsodize about the various outfits I could build around that sweater.
At school the next day, I rolled and unrolled the cuffs on my sweater while Mrs. Pugh wrote detailed notes on the board about study skills. We were learning how to make flashcards and she passed out index cards so we could practice. On my card, I made a list of various shirts that would work under the sweater, then considered wearing the sweater without a shirt. I crossed through that idea with enough lines that no one would ever be able to read it. Only girls did that.
In the hallway, three boys followed me, pulling on the hem of the sweater.
"Yellow sweater, yellow sweater!" they screamed. I brushed it off, leaning against the lockers of girlfriends who assured me "It really is your color."
By the end of the day, their teasing had gotten to me. After lunch, I’d left the sweater in my locker, hoping they would stop. The three boys had increased their ranks exponentially. By the time the final bell rang, upwards of twenty boys were poking at me, smacking the back of my head and stepping up their verbal assault to "Yellow sweater faggot." Young homophobes are so creative.
Despite the cold, I walked fifteen blocks to the public library with the sweater tucked into my backpack. I didn’t cry until I got to the basement, where I used to hide for hours with stacks of books. When I wandered through the stacks again, Jeff Houser and Paul Kenny followed me, They watched me from the other side of the shelves, then pushed books on top of my head. They were at the library because kids played kissing games after school in the adjoining graveyard. I usually played with them, but not today.
"Where’s your yellow sweater, faggot?"
I sat down in the young adult section, where the books would be lighter. I covered my head with both hands as their bombs fell all around me. Finally, they lost interest. I reshelved the books and walked home.
Once inside my room, I closed the door and put on the sweater. I pulled my head inside the neck hole and pulled the sleeves all the way over my fists.
Before we went out to dinner that night, Dad announced that Mom was running late. Every time we left the house as a family unit, Dad called Mom a "cliffhanger." Truth was, Dad always held things up.
As I got into the backseat, Dad turned around and said "That sweater’s faggy."
"It’s his color, Bev," Mom said. "It’s your color, too. You’re both Autumns."
Then she gunned the car out of the driveway.
It seemed ludicrous to me that Dad would weigh in on my outfit, since he was color blind. Mom had to carefully monitor him in the morning so he didn’t twist out of the house in some outfit that would make everyone at the office think Mom was sleeping late. It was not uncommon for Dad to think that combining plaid pants, a striped shirt, and a paisley tie was a good idea.
Dad and I sat across from each other at the restaurant. I was picking every fight I could. The fastest way to an entertaining argument with Dad was to make bratty comments about unilateral demilitarization and atheism. Dad sipped two glasses of Cognac and made womanizing comments to the waitress. The benevolent retired Colonel was napping. During his third Cognac, Dad pointed at me and said he could kick my little ass. He gulped the rest of that lighter fluid and announced that it was time for us to leave.
Later I heard Mom and Dad talking in bed. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, even with a glass against the door, but it went on for several hours.
That night, my mother started preparing the way for me. From that point on, she corrected Dad when he used antigay epithets. She called him into the bedroom when there were gay people on Oprah or Donahue. And she told him that if he didn’t lighten up, he’d lose another son.
Mom must have really scared him, because the next morning—I swear to God—Dad wore yellow pants to the office.