Pain “Pain,” an excerpt from the book Reaching Up forManhood, draws on the writer’s training and experience as apsychologist. He uses the narrative to explain the power of memoryin our lives, especially memory of painful experiences. Hisparticular focus is on boys and on the ways, they are taught torepress the wounds caused by painful experiences. Nonetheless, itshould be easy for readers to apply his insights to the experiencesof girls.

1. Boys are taught to suffer their wounds in silence. To pretendthat it doesn’t hurt, outside or inside. So many of them carry thescars of childhood into adulthood, never having come to grips withthe pain, the anger, the fear. And that pain can change boys andbring doubts into their lives, though more often than not they haveno idea where those doubts come from. Pain can make you afraid tolove or cause you to doubt the safety of the ground you walk on. Iknow from my own experience that some pain changes us forever.

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

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

4. There was one other place where we found grass in ourneighborhood. Real grass. Lawn-like grass. It was in the side yardof a small church that was on the corner of Union Avenue and HomeStreet. The church was small and only open on Sundays. The yard andits precious grass were enclosed by a four-foot-high fence. We werenot allowed in the yard by the pastor of the church.

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

6. It would have stayed off limits if it had not been forfootball. Football came into my life one fall when I was nine yearsold, and I played it every fall for the rest of my childhood andadolescence. But football in the inner city looked very differentthan football played other places. The sewer manhole covers werethe end zones. Anywhere in the street was legal playing territory,but not the sidewalk. There could be no tackling on pavement, sothe game was called two-hand touch. If you touched an opponent withboth hands, play had to stop. The quarterback called colorfulplays: “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 youshort. 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 thechurchyard. A decision had to be made. Rory was the first to bringit up. “We should sneak into the churchyard and play tackle.”

8. We all walked over to Home Street and, out of sight of frontwindows, climbed over the fence and walked onto the grass. A thickcarpet of grass that felt like falling on a mattress. We were inheaven.

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

10. There was one problem with our football field, which wasabout thirty yards long and fifteen yards wide: at the far endthere was a built-in barbecue pit, right in the middle of the endzone. If we were running with the football, or going out for apass, we had to avoid the barbecue pit with its metal rods alongthe top, set into its concrete sides. We knew that no matter whatyou were doing when in that area of the yard, you had to keep oneeye on the barbecue pit. To run into its concrete sides—or, evenworse, the metal bars—would be very painful and dangerous.

11. I was fast and crafty. I loved to play split end on theoffense. I could fake out the other kids and get free to catch theball. I had one problem, though—I hadn’t mastered catching afootball thrown over my head. To do this you have to lean your headback and watch as the football descends into your hands. Keep youreye on the ball, that’s the trick to catching one over theshoulder. We all wanted to go deep for “the bomb”—a ball thrown asfar as possible, where a receiver’s job is to run full speed andcatch it without-stretched hands. It took me forever to learn toconcentrate on the football, with my head back as far as it wouldgo, while running full speed. But finally, I mastered it. I was nowa truly dangerous receiver. If you played too far away from me Icould catch the ball short, and if you came too close I could runright 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 feltNed take a step forward, going for the fake as I turned and ranright by him. Walter launched the bomb. As the football left hishand I stopped looking over my shoulder at him and started mysprint to the end zone. After running ten yards I tilted my headback and looked up at the bright blue fall sky. Nothing. I lookedforward again and ran harder, then looked up again. There it was,the brown leather football falling in a perfect arc toward theearth, toward where I would be in three seconds, toward the winningtouchdown.

13. And then pain. The bar of the barbecue pit caught me inmidstride in the middle of my shin. I went down in a flurry ofashes, legs and arms flying every which way. The pain wasall-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 thebar. The pain was too much. I lay flat on the ground, trying to cryout. I could only make a humming sound deep in the back of mythroat. My friends gathered around and I tried to act like a bigboy, the way I had been taught. I tried not to cry. Then the painconsumed me and I couldn’t see any of my friends anymore. I howledand then cried and then howled some more. The boys saw the bloodseeping 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 lookat the damage. All the other boys who had been playing or watchingwere in a circle around me. They all grimaced and turned away. Iknew it was bad then, and I howled louder.

14. Catching the metal bar in full stride with my shin hadcrushed a quarter-sized hole in my leg. The skin was missing andeven to this day I can feel the indentation in my shinbone wherethe bar gouged out a small piece of bone. I was off my feet for afew days and it took about two weeks for my shin to healcompletely. Still, I was at the age where sports and friends meanteverything to me. I couldn’t wait to play football in thechurchyard again, but I was a much more cautious receiver thanbefore.

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

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

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

18. Boys are taught by coaches to play with pain. They are toldby parents that they shouldn’t cry. They watch their heroes on thebig screen getting punched and kicked and shot, and while theseheroes might groan and yell, they never cry. And even some of uswho should know better don’t go out of our way to make sure ourboys know about our pain and tears, and how we have healedourselves. By sharing this we can give boys models for their ownhealing and recovery.

19. Even after I was grown I believed that ignoring pain waspart of learning to be a man, that I could get over hurt by simplywilling it away. I had forgotten that when I was young I couldn’trun in an open field without looking down, that with no one to talkto me about healing, I spent too many years unable to trust theground beneath my feet.

EXPOSITORY TECHNIQUES

1. Which paragraphs in the essay are devoted primarily toretelling events? Which focus on analyzing the events andgeneralizing about behavior?

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

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