In Dreams
self-confidence in a man as they are to native good looks. I wish I could have known that then.
As my hair grew longer toward the end of the school year,
several seniors began to take notice and began to harass me about it. With
my shoulder length hair, girlish long eyelashes and hesitant manner of walking
in crowded hallways, I suppose I looked somewhat feminine. In the mid-60s
before such a look became fashionable, I was a target. I even got into a
fistfight over it just outside my history class, one I was losing badly
before we were separated by a senior who chastised me for fighting with
a boy six inches shorter than I was.
The details of what followed are hazy to me now, but
that night I had attempted suicide twice, once using turpentine (which I
vomited up without incident), and finally with an arsenic-based insecticide
that left me much sicker, so much so the when my mother found me half-conscious
an ambulance was called. Whether it was a cry for help, or just a way to
avoid going to school and facing all that harassment and humiliation, I
had progressed to a whole new level. I was held for 72 hours
