The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  He has had other losses in his life. He is old enough to know people who have died and to know things about the world that are worrisome. When he dreams, he dreams about moving to Wyoming, which he has visited with his family. His plan is to buy land there and have some sort of ranch that would definitely include horses. Sometimes when he talks about this, it sounds as ordinary and hard-boiled as a real estate appraisal; other times it can sound fantastical and wifty and achingly naive, informed by the last inklings of childhood—the musings of a balmy real estate appraiser assaying a wonderful and magical landscape that erodes from memory a little bit every day. The collision in his mind of what he understands, what he hears, what he figures out, what popular culture pours into him, what he knows, what he pretends to know, and what he imagines makes an interesting mess. The mess often has the form of what he will probably think like when he is a grown man, but the content of what he is like as a little boy.

  He is old enough to begin imagining that he will someday get married, but at ten he is still convinced that the best thing about being married will be that he will be allowed to sleep in his clothes. His father once observed that living with Colin was like living with a Martian who had done some reading on American culture. As it happens, Colin is not especially sad or worried about the prospect of growing up, although he sometimes frets over whether he should be called a kid or a grown-up; he has settled on the word kid-up. Once, I asked him what the biggest advantage to adulthood will be, and he said, “The best thing is that grown-ups can go wherever they want.” I asked him what he meant, exactly, and he said, “Well, if you’re grown up, you’d have a car, and whenever you felt like it, you could get into your car and drive somewhere and get candy.”

  COLIN LOVES RECYCLING. He loves it even more than, say, playing with little birds. That ten-year-olds feel the weight of the world and consider it their mission to shoulder it came as a surprise to me. I had gone with Colin one Monday to his classroom at Montclair Cooperative School. The Co-op is in a steep, old, sharp-angled brick building that had served for many years as a public school until a group of parents in the area took it over and made it into a private, progressive elementary school. The fifth-grade classroom is on the top floor, under the dormers, which gives the room the eccentric shape and closeness of an attic. It is a rather informal environment. There are computers lined up in an adjoining room and instructions spelled out on the chalkboard—BRING IN: (1) A CUBBY WITH YOUR NAME ON IT, (2) A TRAPPER WITH A 5-POCKET ENVELOPE LABELED SCIENCE, SOCIAL STUDIES, READING/LANGUAGE ARTS, MATH, MATH LAB/COMPUTER; WHITE LINED PAPER; A PLASTIC PENCIL BAG; A SMALL HOMEWORK PAD, (3) LARGE BROWN GROCERY BAGS—but there is also a couch in the center of the classroom, which the kids take turns occupying, a rocking chair, and three canaries in cages near the door.

  It happened to be Colin’s first day in fifth grade. Before class began, there was a lot of horsing around, but there were also a lot of conversations about whether Magic Johnson had AIDS or just HIV and whether someone falling in a pool of blood from a cut of his would get the disease. These jolts of sobriety in the midst of rank goofiness are a ten-year-old’s specialty. Each one comes as a fresh, hard surprise, like finding a razor blade in a candy apple. One day, Colin and I had been discussing horses or dogs or something, and out of the blue he said, “What do you think is better, to dump garbage in the ocean, to dump it on land, or to burn it?” Another time, he asked me if I planned to have children. I had just spent an evening with him and his friend Japeth, during which they put every small, movable object in the house into Japeth’s slingshot and fired it at me, so I told him that I wanted children but that I hoped they would all be girls, and he said, “Will you have an abortion if you find out you have a boy?”

  At school, after discussing summer vacation, the kids began choosing the jobs they would do to help out around the classroom. Most of the jobs are humdrum—putting the chairs up on the tables, washing the chalkboard, turning the computers off or on. Five of the most humdrum tasks are recycling chores—for example, taking bottles or stacks of paper down to the basement, where they would be sorted and prepared for pickup. Two children would be assigned to feed the birds and cover their cages at the end of the day.

  I expected the bird jobs to be the first to go. Everyone loved the birds; they’d spent an hour that morning voting on names for them (Tweetie, Montgomery, and Rose narrowly beating out Axl Rose, Bugs, Ol’ Yeller, Fido, Slim, Lucy, and Chirpie). Instead, they all wanted to recycle. The recycling jobs were claimed by the first five kids called by Suzanne Nakamura, the fifth-grade teacher; each kid called after that responded by groaning, “Suzanne, aren’t there any more recycling jobs?” Colin ended up with the job of taking down the chairs each morning. He accepted the task with a sort of resignation—this was going to be just a job rather than a mission.

  On the way home that day, I was quizzing Colin about his worldviews.

  “Who’s the coolest person in the world?”

  “Morgan Freeman.”

  “What’s the best sport?”

  “Football.”

  “Who’s the coolest woman?”

  “None. I don’t know.”

  “What’s the most important thing in the world?”

  “Game Boy.” Pause. “No, the world. The world is the most important thing in the world.”

  DANNY’S PIZZERIA is a dark little shop next door to the Montclair Cooperative School. It is not much to look at. Outside, the brick facing is painted muddy brown. Inside, there are some saggy counters, a splintered bench, and enough room for either six teenagers or about a dozen ten-year-olds who happen to be getting along well. The light is low. The air is oily. At Danny’s, you will find pizza, candy, Nintendo, and very few girls. To a ten-year-old boy, it is the most beautiful place in the world.

  One afternoon, after class was dismissed, we went to Danny’s with Colin’s friend Japeth to play Nintendo. Danny’s has only one game, Street Fighter II Champion Edition. Some teenage boys from a nearby middle school had gotten there first and were standing in a tall, impenetrable thicket around the machine.

  “Next game,” Colin said. The teenagers ignored him.

  “Hey, we get next game,” Japeth said. He is smaller than Colin, scrappy, and, as he explained to me once, famous for wearing his hat backward all the time and having a huge wristwatch and a huge bedroom. He stamped his foot and announced again, “Hey, we get next game.”

  One of the teenagers turned around and said, “Fuck you, next game,” and then turned back to the machine.

  “Whoa,” Japeth said.

  He and Colin went outside, where they felt bigger.

  “Which street fighter are you going to be?” Colin asked Japeth.

  “Blanka,” Japeth said. “I know how to do his head-butt.”

  “I hate that! I hate the head-butt,” Colin said. He dropped his voice a little and growled, “I’m going to be Ken, and I will kill you with my dragon punch.”

  “Yeah, right, and monkeys will fly out of my butt,” Japeth said.

  Street Fighter II is a video game in which two characters have an explosive brawl in a scenic international setting. It is currently the most popular video arcade game in America. This is not an insignificant amount of popularity. Most arcade versions of video games, which end up in pizza parlors, malls, and arcades, sell about two thousand units. So far, some fifty thousand Street Fighter II and Street Fighter II Championship Edition arcade games have been sold. Not since Pac-Man, which was released the year before Colin was born, has there been a video game as popular as Street Fighter. The home version of Street Fighter is the most popular home video game in the country, and that, too, is not an insignificant thing. Thirty-two million Nintendo home systems have been sold since 1986, when it was introduced in this country. There is a Nintendo system in seven of every ten homes in America in which a child between the ages of eight and twelve resides. By the time a boy in America turns ten, he will almost certainly have been exposed to Ninten
do home games, Nintendo arcade games, and Game Boy, the handheld version. He will probably own a system and dozens of games. By ten, according to Nintendo studies, teachers, and psychologists, game prowess becomes a fundamental, essential male social marker and a schoolyard boast.

  The Street Fighter characters are Dhalsim, Ken, Guile, Blanka, E. Honda, Ryu, Zangief, and Chun Li. Each represents a different country, and they each have their own special weapon. Chun Li, for instance, is from China and possesses a devastating whirlwind kick that is triggered if you push the control pad down for two seconds and then up for two seconds, and then you hit the kick button. Chun Li’s kick is money in the bank, because most of the other fighters do not have a good defense against it. By the way, Chun Li happens to be a girl—the only female Street Fighter character.

  I asked Colin if he was interested in being Chun Li. There was a long pause. “I would rather be Ken,” he said.

  The girls in Colin’s class at school are named Cortnerd, Terror, Spacey, Lizard, Maggot, and Diarrhea. “They do have other names, but that’s what we call them,” Colin told me. “The girls aren’t very popular.”

  “They are about as popular as a piece of dirt,” Japeth said. “Or, you know that couch in the classroom? That couch is more popular than any girl. A thousand times more.” They talked for a minute about one of the girls in their class, a tall blonde with cheerleader genetic material, who they allowed was not quite as gross as some of the other girls. Japeth said that a chubby, awkward boy in their class was boasting that this girl liked him.

  “No way,” Colin said. “She would never like him. I mean, not that he’s so . . . I don’t know. I don’t hate him because he’s fat, anyway. I hate him because he’s nasty.”

  “Well, she doesn’t like him,” Japeth said. “She’s been really mean to me lately, so I’m pretty sure she likes me.”

  “Girls are different,” Colin said. He hopped up and down on the balls of his feet, wrinkling his nose. “Girls are stupid and weird.”

  “I have a lot of girlfriends, about six or so,” Japeth said, turning contemplative. “I don’t exactly remember their names, though.”

  The teenagers came crashing out of Danny’s and jostled past us, so we went inside. The man who runs Danny’s, whose name is Tom, was leaning across the counter on his elbows, looking exhausted. Two little boys, holding Slush Puppies, shuffled toward the Nintendo, but Colin and Japeth elbowed them aside and slammed their quarters down on the machine. The little boys shuffled back toward the counter and stood gawking at them, sucking on their drinks.

  “You want to know how to tell if a girl likes you?” Japeth said. “She’ll act really mean to you. That’s a sure sign. I don’t know why they do it, but it’s always a sure sign. It gets your attention. You know how I show a girl I like her? I steal something from her and then run away. I do it to get their attention, and it works.”

  They played four quarters’ worth of games. During the last one, a teenager with a quilted leather jacket and a fade haircut came in, pushed his arm between them, and put a quarter down on the deck of the machine.

  Japeth said, “Hey, what’s that?”

  The teenager said, “I get next game. I’ve marked it now. Everyone knows this secret sign for next game. It’s a universal thing.”

  “So now we know,” Japeth said. “Colin, let’s get out of here and go bother Maggie. I mean Maggot. Okay?” They picked up their backpacks and headed out the door.

  PSYCHOLOGISTS IDENTIFY ten as roughly the age at which many boys experience the gender-linked normative developmental trauma that leaves them, as adult men, at risk for specific psychological sequelae often manifest as deficits in the arenas of intimacy, empathy, and struggles with commitment in relationships. In other words, this is around the age when guys get screwed up about girls. Elaine and Jim Duffy, and probably most of the parents who send their kids to Montclair Cooperative School, have done a lot of stuff to try to avoid this. They gave Colin dolls as well as guns. (He preferred guns.) Japeth’s father has three motorcycles and two dirt bikes but does most of the cooking and cleaning in their home. Suzanne, Colin’s teacher, is careful to avoid sexist references in her presentations. After school, the yard at Montclair Cooperative is filled with as many fathers as mothers—fathers who hug their kids when they come prancing out of the building and are dismayed when their sons clamor for Supersoaker water guns and war toys or take pleasure in beating up girls.

  In a study of adolescents conducted by the Gesell Institute of Human Development, nearly half the ten-year-old boys questioned said they thought they had adequate information about sex. Nevertheless, most ten-year-old boys across the country are subjected to a few months of sex education in school. Colin and his class will get their dose next spring. It is yet another installment in a plan to make them into new, improved men with reconstructed notions of sex and male-female relationships. One afternoon I asked Philip, a schoolmate of Colin’s, whether he was looking forward to sex education, and he said, “No, because I think it’ll probably make me really, really hyper. I have a feeling it’s going to be just like what it was like when some television reporters came to school last year and filmed us in class and I got really hyper. They stood around with all these cameras and asked us questions. I think that’s what sex education is probably like.”

  At a class meeting earlier in the day:

  Colin’s teacher, SUZANNE: Today was our first day of swimming class, and I have one observation to make. The girls went into their locker room, got dressed without a lot of fuss, and came into the pool area. The boys, on the other hand, the boys had some sort of problem doing that rather simple task. Can someone tell me what exactly went on in the locker room?

  KEITH: There was a lot of shouting.

  SUZANNE: Okay, I hear you saying that people were being noisy and shouting. Anything else?

  CHRISTIAN: Some people were screaming so much that my ears were killing me. It gave me, like, a huge headache. Also, some of the boys were taking their towels, I mean, after they had taken their clothes off, they had their towels around their waists and then they would drop them really fast and then pull them back up, really fast.

  SUZANNE: Okay, you’re saying some people were being silly about their bodies.

  CHRISTIAN: Well, yeah, but it was more like they were being silly about their pants.

  COLIN’S BEDROOM is decorated simply. He has a cage with his pet parakeet, Dude, on his dresser, a lot of recently worn clothing piled haphazardly on the floor, and a husky brown teddy bear sitting upright in a chair near the foot of his bed. The walls are mostly bare, except for a Spiderman poster and a few ads torn out of magazines he has thumbtacked up. One of the ads is for a cologne, illustrated with several small photographs of cowboy hats; another, a feverish portrait of a woman on a horse, is an ad for blue jeans. These inspire him sometimes when he lies in bed and makes plans for the move to Wyoming. Also, he happens to like ads. He also likes television commercials. Generally speaking, he likes consumer products and popular culture. He partakes avidly but not indiscriminately. In fact, during the time we spent together, he provided a running commentary on merchandise, media, and entertainment:

  “The only shoes anyone will wear are Reebok Pumps. Big T-shirts are cool, not the kind that are sticky and close to you, but big and baggy and long, not the kind that stop at your stomach.”

  “The best food is Chicken McNuggets and Life cereal and Frosted Flakes.”

  “Don’t go to Blimpie’s. They have the worst service.”

  “I’m not into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles anymore. I grew out of that. I like Donatello, but I’m not a fan. I don’t buy the figures anymore.”

  “The best television shows are on Friday night on ABC. It’s called TGIF, and it’s Family Matters, Step by Step, Dinosaurs, and Perfect Strangers, where the guy has a funny accent.”

  “The best candy is Skittles and Symphony bars and Crybabies and Warheads. Crybabies are great because if you eat a lot o
f them at once you feel so sour.”

  “Hyundais are Korean cars. It’s the only Korean car. They’re not that good because Koreans don’t have a lot of experience building cars.”

  “The best movie is City Slickers, and the best part was when he saved his little cow in the river.”

  “The Giants really need to get rid of Ray Handley. They have to get somebody who has real coaching experience. He’s just no good.”