This is Me Telling You That I’m Not Afraid to Cry — I’ll Do it Right Now, I’m Not Afraid

In Year Seven we went ‘taping’ a lot. Taping is when you put masking tape face-up on the road so that when a car drives over it the tape wraps around the tyres. We were at my friend’s house. There were four of us. Someone said that we should order pizza and tape the delivery driver on his way out. My friend yelled at his mum that we wanted pizza and she ordered pizza. We ran out the back gate and down the road. There were two empty plastic Coke bottles on the road. We tied the Coke bottles to the masking tape and put the tape on the road. We hid in the bushes. We giggled a lot. The delivery driver ran over the tape and kept driving for a bit, and the plastic bottles kept flicking up and hitting his windows. The delivery guy stopped. The delivery guy got out and looked around. He seemed nervous. He said, ‘Hijo de puta.’ He crouched and tried to get the tape off, but it was all wrapped around his tyres. He called the cops. The cops arrived and cut the tape off with a knife. They shone lots of torches. We lay in the bushes for two hours in all, on our stomachs and in the dirt. There were lots of mosquitoes. When I got home, my mum said, ‘Jesus, you look like you were eaten alive,’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ In my bed, I felt pretty shitty. I thought: you have done a shit thing and this is why you feel shitty.

When I was younger, I cried a lot because I had trouble hiding my emotions. When I got older, people told me to hide my emotions because that’s what it means to ‘become a man’. When we moved back to Brisbane, my parents had a meeting at Brisbane Boys College because me and Bear were maybe gonna go there. When my parents asked what they could expect from the school, the principal said, ‘We’ll turn your boys into real men.’ My mum laughed. Then she said, ‘Oh no, not for us.’ I love my mum. I still cry all the time. I’m glad I’m not a ‘real man’. In many ways it seems like the opposite of what I want to be.