The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...

The Outsiders
he fight takes place in the bright light of adult view -- on a weekday
afternoon, on a tree-lined residential street, within sight of the police station
and a block from the middle school. The smaller boy, about 12, waits until
there is a safe distance between himself and the other boy, about 13. Then he
sends a curse. It lands. He waits. No response. He follows with a homophobic
slur. His opponent -- a chubby boy nicknamed Sex Machine -- finally turns
around.
A freckled friend of Sex Machine's loops around him on his bicycle, lazily doing
doughnuts. He prods Sex Machine chirpily: "You gonna take that? He's a punk!"
Halfheartedly, Sex Machine blusters back a retort. More friends appear and
cajole him, challenging him to at least pretend that he has nerve.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is writing a
book about inner-city girls, due out
next year.
"C'mon, Sex Machine!" one shouts, then
whispers to another, alarmed: "Look at him. He
keeps backing up!"
Whatever started the fight is irrelevant. The friends clamber up a nearby wire
fence to get a good view, hyper spiders clinging to the mesh.
Sex Machine is frightened. Despite his oversize T-shirt, you can see the rise and
fall of his heaving chest. A man's voice chimes in and shouts encouragement to
the smaller boy from the driveway.
"That's his father!" a boy says. "Can you believe it? He's telling him to fight!"
"That's not right," says a girl.
Borrowing from the man's confidence, the smaller boy rushes forward and
swings. Sex Machine stumbles backward as he tries to duck. A woman leans out
from the second-floor window of a ranch house and says, "Come in, come in,"
without sounding as though she means it, a weary Juliet.
Sex Machine looks desperate, flailing his arms frantically, trying to flag down a
car. Luckily, one stops. Apparently, it's his mother. All the tension and fear that
his body has been holding bursts into punctuated sobs. He storms around the car
to the passenger side. His freckled friend, who had been cheering within inches
of the action, cycles over and dismounts to say goodbye. With all the fury raging
inside him, Sex Machine bellows, "You didn't help me!" then shoves him to the
ground.
ntrim, New Hampshire, where the fight took place, is a long way away
from Littleton, Colo., as well as from Conyers, Ga., where a 15-year-old
boy shot six classmates at his high school in May. It is one of nine towns
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990822mag-boys-social-coping.html (2 of 13) [8/22/1999 9:18:22 PM]
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