I remember a day on the bus on the way to school when I was in eighth grade, probably in the early spring of 1972. A non-untypical event took place that day, in a long period of my life when I was constantly being bullied, most vociferously on the bus. An asshat seated behind me poured perfume down my neck. I will refer to him hereafter simply as Asshat without article. On this day, as it happens, I remained dry-eyed and rather Stoic about the perfume thing. I don't know why. Perhaps my mind was simply somewhere else. There would have been times when I would have reacted in a way that Asshat and friends would have found amusing. But this time I just sat there. Asshat was annoyed by the non-response (which annoyance, I confess, delighted me). Since he couldn't see anything but the back of my head, he couldn't plausibly, even by his loose standards of plausibility, joyously proclaim that I was crying. So he asked the fellow sitting next to me -- whose name I have ...