The sound of an angry man yelling pierced through the music of my portable CD player. It was Mr. Don from a couple houses down the street, his family’s house a three-bedroom single family home sprawling outward against the misty and gray dawn sky.

I was standing at the bus stop at the top of the hill, an underclassman on his way to high school. I took off my headphones to listen to the action, to his uninterrupted, reprimanding bursts for some unknown offense his son Patrick had committed.

“You stupid little f*ggot,” he yelled.

“Go.”
“Get the fuck out.”

The window was open, the shades up, and I could hear everything and see whoever would pass the window facing me.

Patrick said something indistinguishable, followed by the sound of a glass breaking against the wall.

He said something again, before Mr Don passed by the window in a flash, one arm extended and poised to grab his son’s throat- a resulting clattering of sound, presumably that of a body being slammed against something hard.

A few moments later, Patrick walked out the door, hugging his side. He got in his car, and he slammed the door before starting the engine; it echoed in the quiet morning. The silence hung heavy, settling like snow on the neighborhood, as he drove away.

I don’t know where he was going, and I don’t think he knew either. He wasn’t the type to seek refuge at school.

The yellow bus soon arrived, stopping just up the way.

There was one more outburst that shook the street as I walked toward it.

Another glass thrown at the wall, as Mr. Don yell the word “fuck” again into the ether. Then he started crying hysterically.

A grown man sobbing.

Not knowing what else to do, I put my headphones on again and climbed the steps of my ride to school. It seemed as much an answer to the situation as anything else.

I don’t remember what else I learned that day, but a couple years later, I went to college.

Patrick went to jail for five years, because he got caught selling heroin. Eventually he was released to rejoin his girlfriend and the son he had never met.

I still wonder what he says to his child when he’s angry.

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This is the first essay in a multi-part series exploring the ways I was taught what manhood was and the men in my community who transmitted the expectations and limitations that come along with it: Me, a gay boy raised in a MAGA County of agrarian, rural Maryland.