When I was in my twenties, I thought I wanted to be a writer. I started off writing about things that never happened to me and wrote myself into overly detailed, and banal circumstances that did more to prove my immaturity than it did to provide the reader with an entertaining and halfway believable anecdote. It seems that these days when you pick up a literary journal or read artsy new fiction it’s nothing more than clumsy futzing around and sexual preening. So and so did him or her and maybe both at the same time. The only thing worse than the stories about sloppy twenty something relationships are the stories about Mommies and Daddies who do bad things to their children, written from the perspective of a child. Life is messy. We get that. It doesn’t require an extraordinary amount of literary skill to stick the obvious glaring truth into our eyes like a dull pencil. I don’t want to relive the transgressions of my stupid twenties and I don’t think the people involved would care to either. I was dumb, thoughtless and utterly ignorant to the needs of those around me. I still am dumb, a little bit less thoughtless, but I’m really trying to be aware of the needs of others. I’m really trying. I’m going to write a story about some stupid shit that happened when I was a kid, because I was a lot more interesting as a child, than I was in my twenties.
When Armand “Jimmy” Kahn pushed me into the mint green row of gym lockers and began punching me in the stomach and head, I didn’t cry because it hurt or because I was scared. I cried because I couldn’t understand why Jimmy could be angry enough to want to hurt me.
“Nice shoes, faggot”, Jimmy said.
I tried to leave the locker room, but Jimmy and some of his friends were blocking the entrance and I was pushed into the corner. As I tried to push past the crowd, Jimmy’s friends pushed me back into my corner. Jimmy walked up to me and stood about three and a half inches from my face. I could feel his sweet breath.
“What are you looking at faggot?”, he said, his dark brown eyes wide and glaring, locking onto mine.
The first time Jimmy hit me, I stood there and thought about why he would want to hurt me, and what reason he would care to expend such a violent burst of energy on me. My mind exploded into a wash of black and static and that humming sound that you get after taking a punch to the head. That violent reaction led me to cry.
“You’re such a pussy”, Jimmy said.
“You don’t know the difference between a toothbrush and a toothpick,” I said.
“What?! What did he just say?”
The kids that surrounded us starting laughing.
“You don’t get it do you? Do you hate yourselves?”, I said.
“Come on let’s leave”, Jimmy said after pushing me one final time.
The group left and I stayed behind to pick up my gym bag and its contents from off the floor.
Jimmy’s aggression was neither the first, not the last time that I would be the subject of someone else’s violence. When Jimmy hit me, something happened. Although I couldn’t articulate it then, the realization that I could never hit the Jimmy’s of the world back, changed me. I didn’t even want to hit the Jimmy’s of the world back, I felt bad for Jimmy. I wanted to be his Dad and pat him on the head and tell him that he was a good boy and that I loved him, but instead I cried.
Since then, I’ve been in many other fights, usually because of defending others who were weak and outnumbered. I’ve taken some blows, but I’ve only ever hit someone once and it was with a hardcover copy of JRR Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”, so I’m not sure that it counts.
In the 4th grade, while I was riding the bus home from school, John Skoglund began boxing Justin Zirbel’s ears. John and Justin were in the 5th grade, and were both “school bus patrols”. They were chosen by the school administration to “watch over the student, and to protect them”.
“Cut it out”, John said mockingly as he struck another blow.
I was a small kid in the 7th grade. I was very thin and lanky and I also looked a lot younger than I was. I walked to the back of the bus.
“John, leave him alone”, I said.
“Stop hitting Justin and I will.”
John and his friends started laughing.
“You need little kids to stick up for you now?”
“SHUT UP!”, Justin said as he pushed me away from him. The bus took a sharp turn and I fell on the floor.
“SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP OR I’M THROWING ALL OF YOU OFF THIS FUCKING BUS!”, shouted the bus driver.
The bus driver cursed at us frequently, but the school administrators either never believed us or didn’t care. I got up off the floor and looked for an open seat. All of the benches were seated with two or more kids.
“I SAID, SIT DOWN!”, yelled the bus driver.
Fighting the turning bus, I ambled towards a seat with just two kids.
“HEY KID? ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID?”
“No way. Find your own seat faggot.”
As the bus driver eyeballed me through his oversized rearview mirror, I could see his face reddening in anger. I panicked. I was holding a hardcover copy of the hobbit by JRR Tolkien and lifted it up in the air as high as I could and brought it down with a dull thud over the head of the obstinate kid who refused to let me sit down.
“What the fuck!”, he screamed as he punched me in the ribs.
The bus driver stopped the bus and clomped down the aisle with his black reebok cross-trainers and vikings jersey, the locks of his glistening gray male perm mullet, bouncing with each step. When he finally reached me, he grabbed my arm and pulled from up to the front of the bus, where he opened the door.
I walked down the stairs and exited the bus.
“Maybe you’ll do better tomorrow”, the bus driver said as he ratcheted the door shut and put the big orange bus into 1st gear. The bus pulled away from the side of the road and the kid I hit in the head with the book rapped his knuckles on the window. As I looked up, he proudly displayed a bony middle finger.
These stories aren’t special. They doesn’t mean anything. They did happen though and they are a part of me. Now that you’ve read this, you’re probably not a better person. But, when Jimmy Kahn beat me up in all those years ago I became a different person. With each blow, something in my head and in my heart opened up a never ending support for all the underdogs in the world. Each blow that I received pummeled not me, but the restraint and apathy that I had towards injustice. And yet, although Jimmy Kahn’s fists opened my eyes to injustice, I still acted out violently toward that kid on the bus who refused to share his seat. Although I had a calling, I too like the rest of the Earth’s inhabitants, was just another broken soul trying to make the best of circumstance.
Nowadays I’m a boring Middle American white male, who spouts happy idealism and spends his days escaping and submitting to the various masters in his life. I still listen to punk rock music, I break the speed limit and I fight the system in ways both small and mostly insignificant. And twenty-year old me would probably call nowadays me a sellout or a poseur or whatever, but nowadays me knows that it’s not selling out if nobody buys it. I grew up in the suburbs, but like you, I saw my share of fucked up shit. I don’t really care about proving myself anymore. I would rather share myself and write about the things that aren’t noticed. Did you know that there are trillions of teeming insects and arachnids just below your feet? Those bugs are literally living and dying in darkness, going about their day while cars and busses move people around from here to there. These worlds exist, yet seldom intersect. How many other worlds do you know?
In some ways, we’re all Jimmy Kahn and we’re all that kid who I hit in the head with the book. I think we’re also a lot like the bus driver. Something in our society teaches us to be like Jimmy Kahn, and ironically it takes a Jimmy Kahn to get us to realize that we shouldn’t be like the Jimmy Kahns’ of the world. It doesn’t take much energy or commitment to stake your ideological flag into the ground and to shout to others about what you stand for, it also doesn’t take much of a commitment to bandy about the middle-school locker room and look for people to beat up. Conservatives, Liberals, blacks, whites, Muslims, catholics; It’s all labels, all of it. These don’t really mean anything except to those who choose to wear them. It’s that same strutting around the locker room. “I’m on this side and he’s on that side. We’re not the same and so he’s a threat”. It’s all bullshit. Labels are a shortcut to thinking. In giant media-centric society, we need labels, because we can’t possibly know everyone and we have a desire to know where we stand in the midst of it all. But it it worth it? Might it be better to not generalize those persons whom we do not know? Probably. But I suppose it would take a lot of Jimmy Kahn’s to get people to give up their labels and I’m not sure that kind of world would be a very nice place to live.
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