The one time I remember attending a greased pig contest was when? Was I five years old? Younger?
It was in River Valley Park. I could probably walk to exactly where it was, but I think the park was been redeveloped since then.
It was a sunny day in summer. There must have been a larger event going on. We were there on a family outing---perhaps a cookout.
I was very excited about the contest. I wanted to catch the pig and keep it. Never mind what I would have done with it. As a kid, one doesn't concern oneself with such trivialities.
My parents paid the entry fee, which must have been small. When it was time for the contest, the kids assembled and got into the pen. I was probably the smallest boy by far. In reality I was too young to be attempting this, but I had so wanted to do this. Did I get into the pen as well? I think I did. But when the pig was released all the other boys swarmed over in a big mob. There was no way I was going to get inside that big mob of boys wrestling with each other to catch the pig. Instead I stood and cried.
I felt humiliated. It still stings to this day. It stings because it feels like something archetypal about my entire character---standing on the sidelines, wandering how I am something to do something and feeling paralyzed because I don't know what to do. Instead I would watch others do it, with shame and envy.
I can forgive myself now because, as I said, I was too small to be there. Yet it feels to me like a flaw in my character. Was it cowardice? Perhaps. But I realize now what the real flaw was.
The real flaw, or rather a weakness, is needing someone to show me how to do something in the world, or else I can't do it. Everyone told me I was smart and bright. I learned to read so early, and no one told me how. I just picked it up. But reading was something I could do on my own. It was not out in the world.
How do people do things in the world? What do they do, that lets them get things done in the world? Those are things few bothered to show me and which frustrated me and fascinated me. I wanted to know all those things. If someone showed me how, I could use their experience as a template. I was very good at that.
I was very good at imitating the success of others. I learned from school teachers because I assumed they knew what they were doing. I didn't rebel against instruction, as so many other boys seemed to do, almost pathologically: I will not do what you want me to do!
I never had that problem of rebellion against instruction. If I was taught someone properly, I picked it up almost immediately. I was a "good boy", a "good student" when I was very young, the ways girls are. Girls succeed because the follow the directions of authority whereas a boy might rebel out of principle and spite.
But I already knew as a young man---maybe not at the time of the greased pig contest but later---tht it was the rebellious boys, the ones the broke the rules and who transgressed boundaries, who became heroes. They were the ones that girls would adore. Those boys took what they wanted, and were rewarded for it. I learned this ironically from my super feminist mother. In those days, everyone talked about male chauvinist pigs being a blight on society. I knew I would never, ever, ever be that.
That incident of the greased pig was a preview of what I would experience in seventh grade as I described in this previous entry. Someone else won the pig, and it was carried away by someone else, the same way I would watch sweet girls I liked being carried away by boys who had no problem transgressing all boundaries put before them. Out of this wound came deep shame that I would overcome only through a long process of maturity, to shed that part of me that I despised as cowardly and passive.
In reality what I saw in the other boys was a part of myself that, at the time, I could not connect to, and that I projected onto others. I indeed learned to connect to it, but I did so with such abandon at one point that it damaged me.
I ask myself is there a way, at that event in River Valley Park circa 1969, whereby I would not have just stood there, away from the melee, but at least tried, the way a boy is supposed to try, even if he fails spectacularly. The answer is yes. I needed the right guidance. My father, however, was not the type of person who could have told me what to do.
I would have needed a different masculine voice, a coach who cared about enough to be a bit harsh. He could have pulled me aside and said:
Look, Matt. I'm not going to lie to you. You're going to be the smallest kid in there, and you will be afraid at first. It's ok to be afraid. Anyone would be afraid in your shoes. You're probably not going to get that pig. It would be a miracle if you did, but if you try with all your might, you might get your hands on it for a second. If you do you will feel really good about yourself. Here's how you do that. At first the older boys will dismiss you as nothing when they see you. Let that be your advantage. You have to dive in there and push your way through like you are fighting for your life. You know how to do that, right? Just dive in there and start fighting for that pig. You are small. So just squirm in there. Just get your hands on it. Even if you get hit and smashed in your nose, it won't hurt. I'm telling you it won't hurt. Trust me. What will hurt is not getting in there and just standing around crying about it. That will hurt more than you can imagine. Just dive in and keep moving, moving, moving no matter what. If they throw you out of the pile, get drive back in. If you do that, then it is done, no matter who wins the pig, the other boys will look at you in your smallness and crown you the real champion. Everyone loves the little kid who tries and fights. Today that can be you. You will win their respect. And one day when you are older, you will win the pig, but you will never win it unless you do what I say. Got it? Good...now get in there. Come out covered in mud and glory. I'm rooting for you. Everyone will be rooting for you. Raise your arms with victory and everyone watching will cheer you.
A speech like, at that point or sometime else, that would have changed the course of my life in ways I cannot tell. I would have taken the instruction and run with it. I just needed someone, a male authority figure, I trusted to give me permission to do that. Nobody ever told me anything like that, in my entire life.
But such a speech would have flown in the face of the kind of ideology in which I was raised, and which was becoming ascendant in our culture even in the early 1970s, that would discourage rather than encourage boys in such a way. So much of the thrust of our culture then was that men had to tame their competitive and warlike impulses. Men needed to become more like women. Boys needed to be more like girls. Many people talk about this issue today. I saw it first hand, and consciously picked up on it. I wanted to conform to it, because I wanted to conform what society said was good. I was the future, after all.
Instead I had learn the wisdom of this through hard knocks, humiliation, and heartbreak. I had to deprogram myself. I became the boy who rejected what I was supposed to do. I had to become the problem child. I had to learn to disappoint my elders instead of making them proud. Yet I was always too scared to break the rules too much, or neglect the critical things I was supposed to do like get into a good college. I got in, and then I dropped out.
It wasn't until I was twenty years old that I began to experience a healthy connection to my masculine nature. I had to go overseas and throw myself into harrowing situations and come out on my own two feet. And I was rewarded for my courage in ways that astonished me, as if the gates of beauty in the world were thrown open to me. Yet even then, I had to relearn the same lessons many times, because I thought it was one and done. I didn't realize that for a man, it was a continuous process that never ends. In that way I am lucky, because if nothing else I am fucking stubborn and refuse to give up. I was not going to be denied living a life to the fullest in my youth. I was going to figure it out. I would be someone's hero.
Now I look at the generation of young men and I see them like I saw myself back then, standing that pen with the greased pig context, wondering what I am supposed to do. I have such compassion for them. They have been told that what they want is wrong and bad. Yet at the same time that we tell young men to be passive, a man who cannot reach out and take what he wants, in some form or another, is a man generally despised by our society and rejected by women. We have millions upon millions of young men like that now. I feel like their older brother.
It is yet another way that I look back at my negative awkward experiences of youth and see myself no longer as an outlier but as a prototype. I do not feel alone. I feel connected to all of them.
