Troll in the Family

We didn’t have a name for it. Not back then. “Gossip” seemed too mild. “Manipulator” made it sound like there was some kind of point. “Trouble maker” came closest but didn’t really nail it.

I never knew my great uncle before he became infirm. By the time I reached the age of remembrance, his joints were so badly seized by arthritis he walked with crutches gripped by frozen claws of hands. Unable to turn his head, he still insisted upon driving, my shotgun-riding great aunt looking right and left for him.

They lived just a short hike through the woods from my grandparents’ cottage where I spent summers. My sister and I spent a lot of time at their house, supping tomato soup and listening to my uncle tell corny jokes. He was a funny guy.

I once asked him how he could laugh so much. “It hurts more when I don’t laugh,” came his profound reply.

But he had a dark side, and the phone was his weapon of choice.

Parked in his recliner like a spider in a web, he would call an acquaintance and prod them into saying something negative about someone else. Once he had a statement, he would hang up and dial its object.

“I was just talking to X, and he said you were a (fill in the blank),” was how it would usually start, prompting the insulted party to cork off.

My uncle would then hang up and redial the first party. “Y says you’re a (insert expletive), and you can go to hell.”

And so it would go. For hours. For days. Getting people riled up was his entertainment.

Of course, it wouldn’t have worked if people weren’t so quick to fall into his trap.

My aunt served up the grilled cheese without comment, leaving my sister and me to make whatever observations we would about the scene.

We found it bizarre, mean and pointless. But we could see his glee. His ability to alter people’s moods and ruin their relationships was power, a creepy, sick kind of power, but power nonetheless. Barely able to move his body, he was still affecting world.

Why didn’t he use his gift of gab for good instead of sowing discord? Was it his pain? Did he want to share his suffering?

I’ll never know. I was still a kid when he died, too young to ask an adult such a probing question.

With only a phone at his disposal, my uncle’s reach was limited by the size of his Rolodex, restricting his damage to flesh and blood acquaintances.

When I encounter trolls, I imagine that’s what my uncle would have become given a laptop and the web, and I wonder if pain and restricted lives drive them, too.

More importantly, I remember the lesson of his exchanges:

Don’t be the sucker who takes the bait.