Jason Mullin

S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders

In the seventh grade, the boys at St. James Catholic School fought a turf war over a book: S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. Although curious of the world, we had no sense of the power of books. For answers, we looked elsewhere. Billy Ruggeri routinely held private show and tell sessions in which he produced numchucks, brass knuckles, and knives of all size and ferocity borrowed from his father’s collection. Chris Gallagher once produced three cans of warm beer, and seven of us gathered round at Webb Park, adopting the bitter, familiar smell of our fathers with each arduous sip. Todd Link often presented us with his mother’s pornography, and Jeff Billings stole cigarettes from his grandmother’s purse at will. These things changed us, and though frightening, they were not unexpected, nothing like our reaction to Hinton. That is, we knew we had to fight one another now and then, and if someone offered a lit cigarette or open beer, then we had to take a drag. Also was it necessary to slip our sweaty palms beneath our girlfriends’ blouses when dared. This we accepted. But a book, a novel no less, rising to a level of importance, of necessity, of grace even, this surprised us wholly.

Before computers and the magic and mystery of the internet fused with the library experience, we regarded the task of searching through card catalogs in order to locate a book equivalent to marching through our own backyards to collect a switch with which to be beaten. The stacks at St. James were impossibly dry, and we suspected wholesome Catholic teachings in every page, positive lessons on life buried deep in the prose. Who could withstand preaching while his body transformed in the grotesquerie of puberty? There was no Stephen King, no Sydney Sheldon (a very good read for a curious thirteen-year-old), no J.D. Salinger, no H.P. Lovecraft. A few liked Poe but were dubious—he wrote poems as well. Was he one of them? The book, our book, had been there all along, we supposed, and now, upon discovering it, we suffered an awakening of sorts.

The Outsiders did not remain checked out for long, two days, maybe three at the most. Many held it a single day, stumbling to school with heavy eyes and the vague notion they were different types of boys than they had thought. One by one, Hinton startled us with the idea such intimacy was possible between us and anything else, let alone a novel. And for those of us not yet indoctrinated, we feared the school would discover the book before we could read it. Despite the recurrent images of handguns and switchblades, the incessant smoking, the coarse language, and the heavy sexual overtones, the book remained on the shelf. Had the nuns slipped? Had Sister Dolores, who had held onto the practice of corporal punishment in school long after its legality expired, allowed us access to this book on purpose? Had the same priests who promised hell fire over missed sermons and Friday cheeseburgers been won over by Hinton’s hard scrabble world? Unless a trap, an oversight this great could not last.

When we spoke of the book, we did not mention its emotional impact, though that was the draw. Instead, we professed love for the knifing by the fountain, for the gang fight in the abandoned lot, or for the way Dally refuses to surrender in the park, choosing a hail of bullets over conformity. We maintained our mantle of aloofness. (Young writers do that, too, disguise their lack of emotional investment with profanity, gore, and aggression.) Yet communal as our experience was, it remained secret. Like all our adolescent pains, we hid them from the only other people capable of empathy, each other. There is no more solitary creature than a seventh-grade boy. Connection was the change we wanted yet feared most. Alone, we confronted our own sensitivity, disapproving, therefore, even of ourselves.

We didn’t know who read it first, who experienced that initial shock of self-discovery, but the fight for its possession gripped us in a kind of temporary psychosis. Eric Gelb wrote Bobby is an Aids-man on the desk of Robert Skully, who insisted no one call him Bobby. And David McMichael punched Terry Burchak so hard in the groin he peed a little blood. Yet no one returned the book unfinished. Those of us who hadn’t read it could scarcely bear the exclusion, the waiting. It’s been three days. Who’s got it? Those in the know teased the others, holding lofty conversations, retelling their favorite scenes, and shooing away the unread. The air in the library thickened, as if violence could erupt any moment. There was something too savage about it all, something awful and permanent about being last, as if our place at the bottom of seventh-grade society was at last confirmed. I would not be that boy.

Back then I was neither bookish nor athletic, neither lonely nor popular, neither bully nor victim. Amorphous in the way of all adolescents, I longed for knowledge of myself. The question what do you want to be when you grow up implies that at present, you are nothing. Finally, when there was no one left tougher than me who hadn’t read the book, the librarian stamped my card. The tattered plastic cover lay bedside while I read the story three times over four days. If I couldn’t read it first, I would read it most, I reasoned. In the novel, Ponyboy suspects his identity is incomplete, that he is more, or at least different, than his greaser label, and sunken into my bed, the only child of a broken marriage, feeling like nothing much, I wondered whether I was something even less than that, perhaps lacking identity altogether, yet realizing on some base level I existed already, an unrealized self, hovering in the future, waiting.