CUSSING one

The single-lane blacktop stretched before us, bleached gray by the early-autumn sun. I walked beside my best friend, Luke, down the road toward his house. The leaf-trees had not yet begun to change, but their hue had been drained by a thirsty summer. The empty road and open woods made us feel brave, and yet the sunshine kept us warm. As we strolled, we talked—maybe the first conversation I ever had. I was seven.

“Did you ever cuss?” I asked.

I never had. I knew the principle vocabulary of cussing, but had never spoken the words. I had never spoken them because I knew they were bad words, an idea I took seriously. Once, I had admonished Nick Kingsley for saying, “S--t!”

“You shouldn’t say that,” I told him. He and several of his big brothers were hunkered in the yard outside of Adam’s shop. “That’s a bad word.”

“I’ll say whatever I d--n well please!” Nick trailed his answer with stream of tobacco spit. He was but one of the childless adults who were my primary sources for foul language. None of the kids I knew cursed, and neither did most of their parents. We had all been told cursing was bad, and for my part I believed it. Even the childless adults helped prove it—cussing was for people who spit chewing tobacco, not for picky eaters.

“No,” Luke said.

“Me neither,” I said. “But do you know the words?”

“Yeah,” Luke said.

It wasn’t true that I had never said the words. I knew that “hell” had a double-meaning, for instance. The acceptable meaning referred to the place where bad people go when they die, the unacceptable one was a bad word. “Damn” and “ass” had similar caveats, but generally, I avoided all three words to play it safe. I had even learned a Sunday school song that went,

And they all went down to Amsterdam

They all went down to Amsterdam

Amster-! Amster-! Shh! Shh! Shh!

You mustn’t say that naughty word. . .

Our voices were taken up by the pale sunshine and the trees left us out of any earshot.

“What’s so bad about cuss words?” I asked Luke. “I mean, if you don’t say them around grown-ups. . .”

“I don’t know,” Luke answered.

“You can’t go to hell for cussing, can you?”

We thought of the people who we’d heard cuss and hoped not.

“I mean, it’s just a word, right?”

“Yeah, it’s just words.”

I don’t remember who went first, or who goaded most, but I hope it was me. Either way, by the time we crossed the dry stones of Little Boulder Creek, I was saying:

“Yeah. ‘Hell.’ What’s wrong with that?”

“ ‘Bitch.’ What’s wrong with that?”

We searched an unspoken repertoire for our next demystification. Shortly, we were left with only alpha and omega, the power words of vulgarity. Noun, verb, adjective, adverb: We spoke them as undifferentiated, all-encompassing bad words.

“ ‘Shit!’ What’s wrong with that?”

“ ‘Fuck!’ What’s wrong with that?”

The only answer we came up with became our new code: don’t cuss around adults. As to the words themselves? Nothing had happened to us when we said them, the sun was still warm, and it was too late to worry about hell.

I had never cussed until that day, and I have never stopped since. It began as an act of will and has become a mode of potent expression and a token of intimacy. I remember that day, however, because it was the closest I have ever been to the language-magic that used to command the gods. That was the day I cast my only spell, changing bad words into just words and trading ancient superstitions for the earthly liberation of my tongue.