Free Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman

an argument. Something about logic, the beauty of old-fashiondom, the fun of getting lost. I think those were my stated positions. My father, so upset that he wasn’t being worshipped, finally stopped the car by the side of the road and ordered me out into the snow. All of this because I wouldn’t keep from saying what I thought. I stood by the asphalt, just a little boy, as my father pulled away. But he didn’t get far. After crawling about twenty feet ahead, the car stopped with the motor running. Some anonymous hand threw open the back door. The car sat, humming in the winter stillness as its faceless inhabitants waited for me to approach, reproached.
    His plan was so obvious. It called for me to be instantaneously shocked into submission by the fear of abandonment. I was supposed to panic and then cry, running towards my parents with gratitude and desire. He expected to dislodge me from my temporary manhood, reduced to a helpless child again. Finally, I was to rush towards the open door and re-enter the car, humiliated, submissive and, most importantly, quiet.
    But something else happened instead. I started walking away from the car, in the opposite direction on the one-way street. I
didn’t have to look behind me. They had obviously not moved. I kept walking, soberly, with determination instead of any frivolous vengeful emotion. And, finally, after turning the bend, I heard my father’s car frantically pull away, knowing he would now have to negotiate incomprehensible country byways in order to be able to re-approach me in my fashion. A certain period of time passed, long enough for me to get lost in a reverie of understanding, until he finally found his way back along the same route from the beginning and was able to pick me up from the side of the road.
    I don’t know what I had imagined I would find inside that car. If I’d had to guess, I would have pictured the four of them rationally dissecting the map, trying to efficiently reach their goal, which was me. But surprisingly, when I plopped back into the seat I was greeted instead by my sister and brother crying uncontrollably, with expressions of sheer terror on their two little faces. What had happened to me was the worst thing either of them could ever imagine. Their fear of my experience was to have a much more profound effect on their lives than the experience they dreaded had actually had on mine. This was the important day in the lives of my brother and sister. It was the day they learned fear, the day they were recruited to learn how to kill.

Chapter Seventeen
    We lived in a two-bedroom apartment. My sister, brother, and me in one room and my parents in the other. They were looking for a larger place. My mother worked at a social service agency and my father was still in law school. I was a constant source of tension. I was not the way they had intended for me to be. This was increasingly obvious. But I was also undiscussable. My sister, on the other hand, had perfected her role as head snitch. The end result being that I was often in a place of fierce punishment including parental tantrums, spankings, and, finally, banishment to the hallway of our apartment building.
    When I imagine myself as a young boy it is a selection of images of privacy. Alone by the side of the road. Alone in the bathroom. Alone at the base of the family closet. And most casually, alone, sitting on the floor of the hallway outside the closed door of my parents’ apartment. Sitting quietly as the neighbors came home from work.
    â€œAre you locked out?” Grace from next door asked quietly.
    â€œNo,” I said. “I’m being punished.”
    By this point the humiliation was gone. I had survived basic training and was now a full-time warrior. I informed neighbors of my punishment with complete nonchalance. It meant nothing to me. I took my blows, survived my trial by fire. And now, even punishment couldn’t stop me. Nothing would make