Retrospective

When I was ten a girl I knew hit me in the face.  She was upside down on the monkey bars, and I was just walking by, thinking about climbing them myself.

This girl had a history of violence against the boys. I recall her walking down the line two years earlier while we were waiting to get into a classroom or something, just randomly kneeing random boys in the balls.

So, when she hit me... I hit her back.  I didn't feel an ounce of pity or regret or chivalry. My parents had failed, after a fashion, to instill those particular traits in me, despite four years of trying to civilize me, as they saw it.

My world was an unfair world, an unjust world.  I started school a month late and thus was slow in learning where the good toys were in kindergarten, and when I asked to play with the kids who already had the toys I was told no.

So I took them.

The older kids had an actual playground, while us 'babies' just had an open field and a few tires and see-saws. Any 'baby' who went to the playground was roughed up and run off, crying, to the amusement of the older kids.

Or so I heard. None of the other kids in my class actually dared try it.

So I did. I got yelled at, screamed at... animal intimidation tactics, but I was unbowed and unbroken and unbent. At the tender age of six I was already a man by certain limited standards. I was learning the unalterable law of the jungle: No one cares for you and your wants but you.

This could not stand. Hitting a girl, four years later, was the last straw. I had broken the one code that could not be broken.  I was sent home early, my father was called, and I was given the mother of all lectures, punished for merely standing up for my right to not-get-hit.

To be honest, the exact fall out is a blur, almost trivial.  I had a few fights with other boys after that, so I know that while it was the climax of my parents efforts to civilize me, to remove from me the basic rights of dignity, self defense and self-actualization in favor of the current tone of false-civilization, it was merely one more paving stone on the long road of hell.

I suppose that if I had a reputation in the final years of my childhood, before the awkward transition of 'adolescence', where one is actually becoming an adult but is treated merely like a very experienced child, it was for my uncompromising stance.  If you picked a fight with me, even with words and threats, I would hold you to it. I would hound you, for days, to actually meet me and fight me. If a fight was interrupted without a clear victor, I would demand a rematch with the same tenacity. I had no patience then for false bravado, for trumpets of unearned victories.  I fought mean, I remember a fight with a boy who wore braces. I punched him in the mouth, deliberately, over and over, until his teeth were red, his lips hamburger.

I had a remarkably peaceful school career.  No one bullied me, no one threatened me.  I rarely fought and was almost never in trouble.

The lesson there is that I maximized my violence, that my willingness to go the distance, the utter intolerance for posturing meant that I rarely had to actually step up.  I hit a girl, once.  I never had to again. I turned a boy's mouth to hamburger, I never had to again.  I didn't shy from the necessity.

I was, however, mocked.  I was called Nicolae Vorkov, the Wolf, after a WWF wrestler popular at the time, a heel.   I hated it, but I knew names were not violence, and so I let it go.  Had I thought consciously about it, or if I had been the bully that some believed me to be, I would have responded with violence driven by childish rage.

Now, of course, I suspect it was a gesture of respect. Mocking respect perhaps, but respect.

Things change, nothing is ever fixed.

My parents relentless drive to civilize me managed to take root, at last, in adolescence. I often praise civilization, as an institution, but the shreds we cling to now are tainted and poisonous, unhealthy. The victims of the age are men, especially those who will not bend their knee and expose their neck on the whims of their masters.

My parents' favorite weapon was fear. The fear that I was the victim, that I was helpless.  Repeat a lie long enough and it becomes truth.  My father was a brilliant manipulator, a master of psychological terror, and he used it responsibly of the most part, but in this... in this he damaged me, betrayed me for a lie he believed in. He believed that my behavior was wrong, that I acted violently out of selfishness and cruelty. He believed I was, in fact, a violent person, exaggerating a few isolated events out of an admittedly short life into a horrific, malthusian grotesquery of daily beatings and savage howls given to a slaughtered pig's head.

Fear was not his only weapon, but it was his subtlest.  He masked it with deliberate injustice. When I fought only to defend myself, against unreasonable provocations I was punished far out of proportion to the perpetrator.

That is not a supposition, he admitted as much to me more than once. Because I was his son, fairness required he not show any favoritism to me, but to the son of another man.

In those very words.

I learned then that I could not love. There is no safe shelter in this world for me, my own parents would give their favor to strangers over their own blood. Who then could I trust? Who could I love?

The fruits of this manipulation would not flower for almost six years, if we use the benchmarks of school changes for the eras of youth.  In the last year of my youth, in every way we can measure it without stretching the term beyond all reason, I found myself at last the victim of bullying.

It started small, with nuisance provocations, the sort that would have once led to a quick, short escalation that ended the problem, an open slap, a kick to the shin, something to show I was willing to resort to the inflicting of physical pain to preserve my space.  I did nothing, mouth empty, vague warnings, and generally proved myself unwilling to fight.

I should not need to tell you that my bullies did not hesitate to escalate, to seek me out and torment me.  We are all animals, and I was weak and sickly, to be culled.

The irony is that I had no fear of my tormentors. None.  It started with two young men, smaller and weaker than I was, younger.  They were no threat to me, physically, and I knew it.

That made it worse. I knew, instinctively, that I could end the pain, the torment, if only I had the will. The ability was always there.

Eventually the two became more, I became a spectacle, a piece of performance art for the vicious males to demonstrate their virility to their mates.  I must have been a curious victim that final day, frozen into a statue. I had no need, no inclination to cower or run... in fact my every fiber wanted to explode into repressed violence, but I could not act.  I was stoic in the face of provocations that reached almost to the point of actual physical violence.

Almost.

Predators almost always have an instinct, an awareness that transcends actual knowledge, for the lines they can and cannot cross.  They must have known that striking me would have broken the spell I was under, or perhaps their own nerve failed them, or some essential humanity took over and limited the cruelty they dared perpetrate.

So, instead, I took out my suppressed rage at the injustice of it all, on my home, on the inanimate objects around me, on my own person.  I was a wounded beast, beyond conscious thought, for hours.

I think my father realized that day what he had done, though we never spoke of it. He gave me empty platitudes, advising me that I could act, that I shouldn't worry about the approbation of authority when the torments had reached that point... but how can a few comforting words undo years of deliberate manipulations? How do you undo the harm?

I can say with some authority that I understand the mentality of school shooters, of those angry young men who have no more outlet for their pain than violence and self destruction. That was me at 18. I wasn't saved by a lack of access to guns but by my own determination to survive and mere chance... chance in that I had other outlets, other outcasts.

But for nearly five years of my life I was a walking time bomb, carrying around more rage than I could safely contain.  The rage itself became my defense against a hostile world. In my youth I had used considered violence to create a safe, comfortable existence in a hostile world, in my adulthood it was the sudden, unpredictable violence I carried within me that kept the cruel and cold world at bay. I was isolated, but I was safe.

Isolated.

Men of all ages use torment and cruelty as a rite of passage, a sign of acceptance and a means of finding the true character of those around them.  We often refer to hazing without seeking to understand why it is so universal.  I was never hazed, not truly, because I could not be trusted with to not explode. And since I wasn't hazed, I wasn't accepted, I was the outsider, the strange one.

Again, this is not supposition. I had it in actual words from those who should have been peers, friends.  People I knew, men I knew, believed I would kick down their doors and murder them if they provoked me, though I had never entertained the idea.

Time heals all wounds.  When I say I was a time bomb for five years, I merely assign a reasonable length of time before I was comfortably in another state of mind.  In truth there was no bright line between praying for someone to rob me, to mug me, to give me an excuse to unleash the rage I felt, to excoriate my pain, and the time when I merely entertained those fantasies out of nostalgia, knowing that I truly didn't need to risk my life to feel... empty.

I don't know when the rage left me, when it was no longer a constant companion.  It is easy to take normal anger and declare it the old comfortable rage, but it is just anger.  I haven't punched a brick wall in over a decade, at least not full force.   I suppose that like many men I express my tension, my stress, my anger in terms of physical action. I pace, I walk, I shovel or chop wood... whatever gets my body moving, gets the tension out of me, but I no longer need it to hurt me, or to break something.

Therapy would not have helped.  Oh, I suppose I could have gotten unreasonably lucky and found a wise mentor who could talk me to where I am now, but the odds are against it. Had I ever spoken honestly to a mental health professional of any stripe about how I actually felt I might have been drugged and restrained for the good of the community.

And yet, we can say objectively, that this would have been wrong. I have been harmless and productive all on my own for my entire life.  Even when faced with outrageous provocations the only harm I've ever done was to myself, and that was never the goal.

But how? How did I do it?

First, I realized that my parents were only human, fallible. They had bought into a lie, and in turn fed that lie to me, shoving it down my throat even as I denied it, until I had to swallow it or choke on it.

Second, I realized that, no matter what anyone told me, I preferred my dignity, my pride, to any possible consequences... that I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees, so to speak.

I realized that I could respond proportionately, and in proportion know that I was in the right, no matter what anyone else told me.  I realized that my rage was not some flaw inherent to me, the legacy of apocryphal berserker ancestors, but the result of living contrary to my nature, living in fear of words.

There was nothing wrong with me.

I was just a boy.

No, I was an exceptional boy, an Alexander the Great of young men. I carried the world on my shoulders.

But we define civilization, humanity itself, as Woman.  Sit still, raise your hand not your voice, talk through conflicts and never, no matter what the reasons, hit a girl.

Buy Chivalry is dead, and women killed it.