To Catch a Beating.
By Jonny White.
On a recent visit back home I took a stroll through some side streets and back roads which surround my mother’s house and it struck me just how far an aggression can spread through a community like an invasive species. The same could be said for kindness, but walking through those familiar streets that night I was not thinking of the many kindnesses of which I was so privileged to enjoy, I was thinking about those beatings.
Known locally as “The Lake” it’s a small neighborhood which rests on the northern border of Newton, which is a western suburb of Boston. While the rest of Newton is predominantly well-to-do and Protestant or Jewish, demographically speaking, The Lake is mostly populated with comfortably working class families of Italian and Irish Catholic ancestry who call themselves “Mushes” who lived in well kept two and three family homes, typically with large, paved driveways with a tomato garden out back, for making sauce. Real estate was more reasonably priced in The Lake than anywhere else in the city, so just before I was born my parents purchased a home nearby, using my mother’s inherited nest-egg. My father was an artist, so we invariably had less money than the families of landscapers and plumbers that we grew up around, but try explaining that to a Mush kid while he’s smacking you senseless for being “rich”, because you aren’t catholic and because you pronounced the “R” in both “Landscaper” and “Plumber”.
In 2003, in an effort to recover some of the losses from its massive legal settlement from the clergy sex abuse scandal, the Archdiocese of Boston began selling off a portion of its extensive properties around the city. Today it’s not uncommon to see, some massive 150 year old, stone churches that have been converted into luxury condominium units. I often wonder how easy it is to relax on the living room sofa of a condo knowing it was made available because a priest raped a kid. There was a church that served The Lake, named Saint Jean the Evangelist’s Parrish, whose presence and legacy was far too toxic for any condo-conversion and had to be torn to the ground, and a clutch of townhouses were erected on its grounds.
If you grew up in Newton but didn’t identify as “Mush” it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to assume that the reason for the bullying and the beatings were because of class, accent or religious affiliation but in hindsight I think it is far more likely that because a few, or perhaps even many catholic children were violated and abused in the most egregious way imaginable by a confidant, guardian and an authority of his community who was of unimpeachable reputation and then those kids were left to their own wits to make sense of it all. In that case, it also wouldn’t seem unreasonable for those kids to act with aggressiveness and cruelty to those who were more vulnerable. And so a seed of seemingly senseless maliciousness is planted inside a neighborhood and left to take root. And to flourish. Thereby one illogical ass-kicking then leads logically to another, ceaselessly on down the line until it becomes just another aspect of the culture.
When I rotated into Junior High School, I was on the run from some children who were a category of tough-kid that could be charitably be characterized as “middle-management”. But I was eleven, my sense of perspective was underdeveloped and so I considered them to be a credible threat. Therefore I had made the decision to form a strategic alliance with some of Bigelow Junior High School’s apex-bullies, in an effort to “fight fire with fire”. Today I understand the absurdity of that particular metaphor, but I didn’t then. It just seemed sensible.
There were many poorly lit and unsupervised corners in Bigelow where the most damaged children perpetuated mayhem amongst each other and upon the general population whenever they could. The most notorious of which was the first floor boy’s bathroom, that was situated just around the corner from the Principal’s office, because, of course it was. One simply did not take it upon himself to enter that bathroom, let alone use it, unless he could fight. I couldn’t fight, and I didn’t have time to learn how and so my only option was try to talk the talk and not to show fear. So one day I made the calculated decision to walk into that bathroom like I owned the place.
Which I didn’t.
To access the toilets, you needed to pass through two sets of doors, a design flaw which only allowed what actually happened inside to pass completely unheard and unnoticed by any outside authorities. The moment I opened the second set of doors I was almost overcome by heavy smoke from cheap weed and a small fire that was set by four boys, whom I knew from from Pop Warner Football. They were feeding a trash fire with fistfuls of balled up, industrial brown paper towels, which was burning in a metal wastepaper basket. They were all bleary-eyed, grinning and cackling like crows about something which didn’t seem funny to me but at which I nonetheless forced myself to laugh along with, rather than belie my apprehension.
It’s possible that during what then followed, I experienced a concussion, and so I can remember turning my back on them in order to use the urinal, and I do remember unzipping my fly, afterwards the memories are disconnected. Like short clips of video or photographs even. Someone grabbed me by the hair and snapped my head backwards, and when I staggered to balance myself, slammed my forehead into the chrome metal flushing mechanism of the urinal. I don’t remember crumpling to the floor but I do remember being hoisted to my feet by two boys, who held my arms behind my back as another one, let’s call him “John” here, took a three-step running start and kicked me with what seemed like all his strength, in my testicles as if it were a two-point field goal attempt. I can remember not being able to breathe, and being kicked while I was sprawled on the floor of the bathroom, and I also remember crawling on my stomach into the hallway of our school, which was then between classes and therefore empty.
I didn’t speak about it until years after the fact, but then it was only in a boastful sort of way, looking back on it with other adults.
“You call that ‘getting your ass kicked?!!?’ Let me tell you about a REAL beating!”
Which is a risky game to play, because there’s always a worse story to be told than your own, floating around out there in the world. And many scars aren’t visible.
I knew at the time that I had no recourse. And more importantly I understood that there was nothing to stop it from happening again. I had to do what I assumed what was expected of me. Simply knuckle up, put my head down and hope that they move on to another kid the next time the mood carries them.
Since then I have been reading a bit about PTSD and how the effects, particularly when the trauma is experienced by a child, can linger and present in predictable ways such as depression, well into adulthood. When a child experiences trauma or violence, without prompt and appropriate guidance immediately afterwards often the kid draws a familiar lesson from the experience; which that if there is no discernable reason for his attack, often the thought that the world is a dangerous place where random acts of violence happen without warning or cause. Which immediately after a trauma is too terrifying to accept.
Or he can decide there is in fact a reason for it and it’s because the victim deserved it. If nobody explicitly tells the child what the precipitating cause actually is, he can logically conclude that it is that there is just something about him which is inherently deserving of a beating.
“I deserved it because I suck. Just in a general sort of way. It’s what I’m worth”.
That’s what I told myself at the time, and it’s a motto that I have adhered to, in one fashion or another ever since. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that this is a fallacy. It’s a glitchy code hardwired into my system and that it is my personal spiritual task to rise above it using the liberal application of forgiveness. For myself and for those boys who kicked the crap out of me that day.
A battering of that magnitude and viciousness doesn’t fall out of the clear blue sky. Something happened to “John” and the rest of those kids long before that afternoon in the first floor boy’s bathroom at Bigalow Junior High School, that made them understand that level of brutality is even possible. They were educated and they learned their lessons. I’m not explicitly suggesting that John was a victim of that demented priest over at Saint Jean the Evangelist Parrish. I couldn’t possibly know that. But his house was within walking distance of that church. I remember because and I passed it on my aforementioned stroll through the neighborhood. But it is entirely likely that “John” knew somebody else who was affected by the abuse, and that he in turn perpetuated and maintained that aggression throughout the community until at last it landed in his lap and in turn my own and on into the lives of many others.
And so, John; for the pain that you undoubtedly suffered in your own life which caused you to lash out onto me so viciously all those years ago, I am truly sorry and I wish to God that it had never happened. If you are reading this, wherever and however that might be, I just wanted to tell you, that from the bottom of my heart;
Go fuck yourself, John.
I still have some work to do.