Question

Pain “Pain,” an excerpt from the book Reaching Up for Manhood, draws on the writer’s training and experience as a psychologist. He uses the narrative to explain the power of memory in our lives, especially memory of painful experiences. His particular focus is on boys and on the ways, they are taught to repress the wounds caused by painful experiences. Nonetheless, it should be easy for readers to apply his insights to the experiences of girls.

1. Boys are taught to suffer their wounds in silence. To pretend that it doesn’t hurt, outside or inside. So many of them carry the scars of childhood into adulthood, never having come to grips with the pain, the anger, the fear. And that pain can change boys and bring doubts into their lives, though more often than not they have no idea where those doubts come from. Pain can make you afraid to love or cause you to doubt the safety of the ground you walk on. I know from my own experience that some pain changes us forever.

2. It all started because there was no grass. Actually, there was grass, you just couldn’t walk on it.

3. In the late fifties and early sixties, the projects were places people moved to get away from tenement buildings like mine. We couldn’t move into the projects because my mother was a single parent. Today most projects are crammed full of single parents, but when I was a child your application for the projects was automatically rejected if that was your situation. The projects were places for people on the way up. They had elevators, they were well maintained, and they had grass surrounding them. Grass like we had never seen before. The kind of grass that was like walking on carpet. Grass that yelled out to little girls and boys to run and tumble and do cartwheels and roll around on it. There was just one problem, it was off limits to people. All the projects had signs that said “Keep Off the Grass.” And there were men keeping their eyes open for children who dared even think of crossing the single-link chain that enclosed it. The projects didn’t literally have the only grass we could find in the Bronx. Crotona Park, Pelham Bay Park, and Van Cortland Park were available to us. But the grass in those parks was a sparse covering for dirt, rocks, and twigs. You would never think about rolling around in that grass, because if you did you’d likely be rolling in dog excrement or over a hard rock.

4. There was one other place where we found grass in our neighborhood. Real grass. Lawn-like grass. It was in the side yard of a small church that was on the corner of Union Avenue and Home Street. The church was small and only open on Sundays. The yard and its precious grass were enclosed by a four-foot-high fence. We were not allowed in the yard by the pastor of the church.

5. Occasionally we would sneak in to retrieve a small pink Spaulding ball that had gone off course during a game of stickball or punch ball, but if we were seen climbing the fence there would be a scene, with screams, yells, and threats to tell our parents. So although we often looked at that soft grass with longing, the churchyard was off limits.

6. It would have stayed off limits if it had not been for football. Football came into my life one fall when I was nine years old, and I played it every fall for the rest of my childhood and adolescence. But football in the inner city looked very different than football played other places. The sewer manhole covers were the end zones. Anywhere in the street was legal playing territory, but not the sidewalk. There could be no tackling on pavement, so the game was called two-hand touch. If you touched an opponent with both hands, play had to stop. The quarterback called colorful plays: “Okay now. David, you go right in front of the blue Chevy. I’m gonna fake it to you. Geoff, see the black Ford on the right? No, don’t look, stupid—they’re gonna know our play. You go there, stop, then cross over toward William’s stoop. I’ll look for you short. Richard, go to the first sewer and turn around and stop. I’ll pump it to you, go long, Geoff, you hike on three. Ready! Break!”

7. All we needed was grass. All our eyes were drawn to the churchyard. A decision had to be made. Rory was the first to bring it up. “We should sneak into the churchyard and play tackle.”

8. We all walked over to Home Street and, out of sight of front windows, climbed over the fence and walked onto the grass. A thick carpet of grass that felt like falling on a mattress. We were in heaven.

9. Football in the churchyard was everything we had imagined. We could finally block and tackle and not worry about falling on the hard concrete or asphalt streets. We didn’t have to worry about cars coming down the block the way we did when we played two-hand touch. And because we were able to tackle, we could have running plays. We loved it. We played for hours on end.

10. There was one problem with our football field, which was about thirty yards long and fifteen yards wide: at the far end there was a built-in barbecue pit, right in the middle of the end zone. If we were running with the football, or going out for a pass, we had to avoid the barbecue pit with its metal rods along the top, set into its concrete sides. We knew that no matter what you were doing when in that area of the yard, you had to keep one eye on the barbecue pit. To run into its concrete sides—or, even worse, the metal bars—would be very painful and dangerous.

11. I was fast and crafty. I loved to play split end on the offense. I could fake out the other kids and get free to catch the ball. I had one problem, though—I hadn’t mastered catching a football thrown over my head. To do this you have to lean your head back and watch as the football descends into your hands. Keep your eye on the ball, that’s the trick to catching one over the shoulder. We all wanted to go deep for “the bomb”—a ball thrown as far as possible, where a receiver’s job is to run full speed and catch it without-stretched hands. It took me forever to learn to concentrate on the football, with my head back as far as it would go, while running full speed. But finally, I mastered it. I was now a truly dangerous receiver. If you played too far away from me I could catch the ball short, and if you came too close I could run right by the slower boys and catch the bomb.

12. The move I did on Ned was picture perfect. I ran ten yards, turned around, and faced Walter. He pumped the ball to me. I felt Ned take a step forward, going for the fake as I turned and ran right by him. Walter launched the bomb. As the football left his hand I stopped looking over my shoulder at him and started my sprint to the end zone. After running ten yards I tilted my head back and looked up at the bright blue fall sky. Nothing. I looked forward again and ran harder, then looked up again. There it was, the brown leather football falling in a perfect arc toward the earth, toward where I would be in three seconds, toward the winning touchdown.

13. And then pain. The bar of the barbecue pit caught me in midstride in the middle of my shin. I went down in a flurry of ashes, legs and arms flying every which way. The pain was all-enveloping. I grabbed my leg above and below where it had hit; I couldn’t bear to touch the place where it had slammed into the bar. The pain was too much. I lay flat on the ground, trying to cry out. I could only make a humming sound deep in the back of my throat. My friends gathered around and I tried to act like a big boy, the way I had been taught. I tried not to cry. Then the pain consumed me and I couldn’t see any of my friends anymore. I howled and then cried and then howled some more. The boys saw the blood seeping through my dungarees and my brother John said, “Let me see. Be still. Let me see.” He rolled my pants leg up to my knee to look at the damage. All the other boys who had been playing or watching were in a circle around me. They all grimaced and turned away. I knew it was bad then, and I howled louder.

14. Catching the metal bar in full stride with my shin had crushed a quarter-sized hole in my leg. The skin was missing and even to this day I can feel the indentation in my shinbone where the bar gouged out a small piece of bone. I was off my feet for a few days and it took about two weeks for my shin to heal completely. Still, I was at the age where sports and friends meant everything to me. I couldn’t wait to play football in the churchyard again, but I was a much more cautious receiver than before.

15. Several years later, when I finished the ninth grade at a junior high school in the South Bronx and was preparing to go to high school, I knew that my life had reached a critical juncture. My high school prospects were grim. I didn’t pass the test to get into the Bronx High School of Science (I was more interested in girls than prep work), so my choices were either Morris High School or Clinton High School. Both of these were poor academically and suffered from a high incidence of violence. I asked my mother if I could stay with my grandparents in the house they had just built in Wyandanch, a quiet, mostly African-American town on Long Island. She agreed, and they agreed, so I went there for my three years of high school.

16. That first year I went out for the junior varsity football team at Wyandanch High and played football as a receiver. I was a good receiver. The years of faking out kids on the narrow streets of the Bronx made me so deceptive that I couldn’t be covered in the wide-open area of a real football field. But I had one problem—I couldn’t catch the bomb. My coach would scream at me after the ball had slipped through my fingers or bounced off my hands. “Geoff! What’s the matter with you? Concentrate, dang it! Concentrate!” I couldn’t. No matter how I tried to focus on the ball coming down out of the sky, at the last minute I would have to look down. To make sure the ground wasn’t playing tricks on me. No hidden booby traps. What happened in the churchyard would flash into my mind and even though I knew I was in a wide-open field, I’d have to glance down at the ground. I never made it as a receiver in high school. I finished my career as quarterback. Better to be looking at your opponent, knowing he wanted to tackle you, sometimes even getting hit without seeing it coming, but at least being aware of that possibility. Never again falling into the trap of thinking you were safe, running free, only you and the sky and a brown leather ball dropping from it.

17. Boys are conditioned not to let on that it hurts, never to say, “I’m still scared.” I’ve written here only about physical trauma, but every day in my work I deal with boys undergoing almost unthinkable mental trauma from violence or drug abuse in the home or carrying emotional scars from physical abuse or unloving parents. I have come to see that in teaching boys to deny their own pain we inadvertently teach them to deny the pain of others. I believe this is one of the reasons so many men become physically abusive to those they supposedly love. Pain suffered early in life often becomes the wellspring from which rage and anger flow, emotions that can come flooding over the banks of restraint and reason, often drowning those unlucky enough to get caught in their way. We have done our boys an injustice by not helping them to acknowledge their pain. We must remember to tell them “I know it hurts. Come let me hold you. I’ll hold you until it stops. And if you find out that the hurt comes back, I’ll hold you again. I’ll hold you until you’re healed.”

18. Boys are taught by coaches to play with pain. They are told by parents that they shouldn’t cry. They watch their heroes on the big screen getting punched and kicked and shot, and while these heroes might groan and yell, they never cry. And even some of us who should know better don’t go out of our way to make sure our boys know about our pain and tears, and how we have healed ourselves. By sharing this we can give boys models for their own healing and recovery.

19. Even after I was grown I believed that ignoring pain was part of learning to be a man, that I could get over hurt by simply willing it away. I had forgotten that when I was young I couldn’t run in an open field without looking down, that with no one to talk to me about healing, I spent too many years unable to trust the ground beneath my feet.

EXPOSITORY TECHNIQUES

1. Which paragraphs in the essay are devoted primarily to retelling events? Which focus on analyzing the events and generalizing about behavior?

2. Why do you think the writer waited until the end of the essay to offer an extended discussion of the psychological consequences of painful events? Where else in the essay might he have undertaken such an explanation?

3. Discuss the strategies the writer employs to create transitions between the paragraphs in the following pairs: 1 and 2, 5 and 6, 6 and 7, 12 and 13, and 17 and 18.

Answer 1

1. On the whole, the paragraph is about the writers personal experience with pain which made him pursue to spread the word on how wrong it is to tell boys they should stop whining upon pain. The paragraphs primiraly devoted to retell events in the essay are the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, and the 16th paragraph. The paragraph focusing on analyzing events and generalizing about behavior are the 17th, 18th and the 19th paragraph.

2. To offer an extended discussion of the psychological consequences of painful events the writer waited until the end of the essay. His conclusion and generalization towards the behaviour were meant to be conclusions to the rest of the body where he retold his experience. Hence, he clarified the reason for him giving this message. He has undertaken such an explaination before the begining of the first paragraph too.

3. Transition from 1st to 2nd paragraph: In the first paragraph the writer expresses his perspective upon pain and boys. He concludes the same by stating that he has learnt all this by his experience. And then he RELATES the next paragraph by narrating his exprience.

Transition from 5th to 6th paragraph: The writer narrates his childhood experience in the 5th paragraphs and then RELATES it to the following paragraph SWITCHING THE TOPIC to football.

Transiton from 6th to 7th paragraph: The writer switches his paragraph to ORGANIZE the events. He descirbes his game in the 6th paragraph and adds up that all they needed was grass. Meanwhile he SWITCHES THE TOPIC to the churchyard grass.

Transition from 12th to 13th paragraph: The writer again ORGANIZES the events in sequence with respect to TOPICS from his game winning conclusion to the pain that followed.

Transition from 17th to 18th paragraph: The 17th paragraph is about conditioning boys not to whine upon pain and the 18th paragraph is another way the feelings of boys are suppressed. Therefore, the author here relates how in different ways boys are conditioned towards pain wrongly.