How to deal with a bully
I decided to publish this in full here after hearing Elizabeth Warren speak in Cincinnati today. It is in my book, Monkey with a loaded typewriter, Mostly true essays. Warning: This may be offensive to some. I don’t care.
When I was about twelve years-old, there was this family of ne’er do-wells who moved into a rental house on Dale Street, between Lafond and Blair in St. Paul. You can look up the neighborhood using Google Maps and take a gander at the kind of neighborhood it is.
Four plus decades passing has gentrified the area by leaps and bounds, but if you can imagine a row of unkept houses where drug dealers hung out on the concrete steps that abutted up to the sidewalks with front doors open leading to dark hallways that smelled of human filth… passing in front of them was my path to and from school every day.
For some reason, one of the boys — who must have been fifteen or so — targeted me to chase and beat up. I tried taking a different path home — risking even worse neighborhoods behind Mackubin and Van Buren. I would get a few days reprieve before he found me and was even madder that I made him work harder to beat me up. I learned to run pretty fast so most days I got away. But when I didn’t, he would pummel me.
One day, I decided I had had enough. I grabbed an old wooden bat, drilled through it and drove several wood screws though the end so the tips came out slightly through the other side. I put this is my bag and went to school. (You could take a bat to school in those days.) Later that day, he chased me down but before he could grab me, I pulled the bat out of my bag and swung. I got lucky and the shot landed on the side of his ribs. He went down and I just kept swinging. He had a thick winter coat on so luckily for me, not many blows drew blood. But the few that did stained the snow red.
I didn’t stop swinging until he quit moving.
All his friends saw me beat the living sh*t out of him from their stoop and they did not move. I probably looked like a crazy m*ther-fu**cker who had nothing to lose. They were right.
It was premeditated. It was rage*. Some may even have called this unprovoked assault. But the cops did not come to get me. My parents never knew what I had done. The bully never came after me again. Shortly afterwards, they moved away. Probably because they got evicted.
In hindsight, things could have gone very badly for me. I could have missed that first shot. He could have overpowered me and used my weapon against me. I could have killed him. He could have had a gun. But things didn’t go badly for me. I engaged him with nothing to lose and kept hitting him until he could no longer get up.
I watch the bullies in Congress get more and more brazen and President Obama using all the tactics that school psychologists tell us to use against bullies. Use your words, avoid engagement, try reasoning with them, tell the authorities. None of this works. Really, it doesn’t. They just tell you this stuff so they don’t have to deal with the bloody bodies of bullies.
I’m watching this play out with all the stomach knots my twelve-year-old self remembers. I know this will not work.
What does work is:
1) Decide when you’ve had enough
2) Engage with conviction
3) Land that first blow hard enough to drop the bully and
4) Keep hitting hard so he never gets back up.
Sorry, kids. It’s not fair when bullies target you, but no other tactic will work, no matter what the politically correct line is.
You could lose the fight, but unless you engage and fight to utterly destroy the bully, you will never get the bully to leave you alone. Ever.
*Even as I am writing this, I feel my cheeks getting hot, my breathing deeper and my pulse racing… Wow… I’ve never been in a fight nor have I beat anyone else up since. Being that angry was terrifying.
A special note to the Secret Service and FBI: I’m not advocating violence against any member of Congress. The pummeling is a metaphor.
