Rehosting "Violence"
originally posted Oct 31, 2018
Last spring, a stranger got in a fistfight and almost died on the street, just below the window of my office.
He looked to be late forties, early fifties. Fat, but not obese. He had been frequenting the bar just a few doors down and gotten into a stupid conflict over nothing with a stranger, twenty to thirty years his junior, and they had taken it outside. It was around 10 in the evening and I was wasting my time browsing image boards.
The guy got knocked over and cracked his head on the sidewalk, knocking him out instantly. He could be a vegetable for all I know.
I was going mostly by audio cues until his wife started screaming. I live in a lively neighbourhood, and I don’t really take note of angry yelling any more. When I heard her, though, I got up and took a look, thinking I might do a little bit of civic duty and call an ambulance. It was a scream of absolute insanity, a deep beastly howl. A sound that betrays when someone has been forced outside their cognitive comfort zone.
The man was lying perfectly still, and the winner of the fight was being assailed by the grieving wife, backing off, walking out into the street. It looked like she was exceeding some invisible force, pushing him backwards, while he was simultaneously being pushed back against a force of gravity, trying to drag him back to the scene of the crime, quote unquote. A woman’s rage fighting, and beating, gravity.
The wife was drunk and furious, while he seemed comparatively sober, realising the gravity of the situation, wanting to either help out, or at the very least stick around for when the cops eventually showed up.
A few other bar patrons had followed them out, one was sitting crouched over at the body, another was on his phone, describing the scene to the emergency dispatcher.
I remember thinking how odd it was to sit in my window sill and watch someone having the worst day of their lives. You might say, well, Randy, you can’t know that, they might be hardy fellows, they might have suffered worse tragedies. They are old enough to have adult children, they could have gone through hells you cant even begin to imagine. And you’d be right. But I had to hope it was.
A few months ago one of my friends got jumped by a bunch of strangers. We’ll call him M. They beat him up and robbed him. I heard about it second hand, when a mutual acquaintance wrote me to ask if I could fill in for the guy for a project.
“Spot just opened up. Are you in?”
I asked him what had happened, just to make small talk. He explained that M had gotten in a “fight”, and was at home with a concussion, but trying to refocus me to a yes/no on the business thing. I prodded a bit more, but he was reluctant to talk about it, and wouldn't go into detail.
“Yes, it’s all terrible of course, beaten up for no reason, senseless, a tragedy. So, are you in?”
The mutual acquaintance is a family man, about twenty years older than M and me. I was a little disappointed with how professional he was about the whole thing.
I wrote M, because I was too scared to call him, fearing that he might be completely fucked, dreading the moment of having that fear confirmed over the phone. Dreading how difficult it would be to talk to him, without hurting him with excessive compassion, “oh you poor thing” and the like, if I could hear on his voice that he was affected mentally.
And I would do that. I wouldn't be able to help myself.
I wrote something like “I've heard some rumours that you have met with misfortune. Seeing as it’s rumours I don’t know how much to worry, but I hope you are well.”
M was grateful. We talked a little, and I still had to contain myself from going through my laundry list of brain damage talking points. Which are, in short:
1. Don’t fucking try to be brave about this.
2. Sleep as much as you need to, and it will be a lot more than you think you prideful son of a bitch.
3. Straining yourself while in recovery can fuck you up for years.
4. You just have to fucking eat it.
Luckily it didn't come to that. M was all right. The mildest of concussions, couple of weeks downtime at most. He even had his pride intact, which I took to mean that he had sufficiently fought back.
I was surprised to find myself caring as much as I did. Me and M weren't the closest of friends, but it felt like if it had happened to a brother. We had talked very frankly about having bad alcohol habits a few times, and I cared about him because he reminded me a lot of myself when I was younger. Only better — a better person, a good person. He’s kind in a way I could only hope to be. Hard worker. Going out of his way to help people when he’s in a leadership position. He struggles, like anyone, but he’s a good lad.
He had been about to walk down the path I had, in regards to drinking, but stopped long before I did. I respected him a great deal for it, and as I was someone who publicly talked about having been an idiot drunk, he had found that he felt he could more safely confide in me about the more humiliating aspects of the thing.
We didn't talk long that night, because I didn't want to keep him. It was late, and didn't want him looking at screens at my expense.
Curiously, he had somewhat of the same attitude as our mutual acquaintance towards the whole ordeal. He didn't quite say “well, these things happen”, but he was passive, accepting, about it. When he’s better I will encourage him to more explicitly angry about it.
We talked a little, but I didn't want to pry either, really just give him my wishes before I went to bed. But for all his allowance and laid back attitude, which I mostly ascribe to whatever physical trauma was there — hey, I ain't no doctor — saying goodnight, one thing he said stuck with me.
“I’m really glad you took the time to write me. It means a lot.”
I grew up in a small farming village community. Maybe a 100–150 residents in the town. My family lived on the outskirts, just outside the eastward town sign. To give the shortest possible yet full presentation: my parents moved to the town the year before I was born, almost 30 years ago, and while my mother has since moved out, my dad is still considered the “new guy” in town.
We had a small school in town. It’s closed today. I had at most fourteen classmates at any year. Everyone knew who everyone was, who their family were, and half of my peers were related at a third or fourth cousin level.
When I was eight or nine, my older brother got jumped by a bunch of kids — the “bad” kids — one day after school. Beat him up, stole something, I forget what. His first mobile phone, I think. I had a confrontation with one of the younger brothers of one of them the next day in school, who tried to tease me about it. Never felt rage just like it.
When I was fourteen, going to a slightly larger school in the next town over, a bunch of my peers kidnapped someone’s pet hamster and tortured it to death. Years later, they burned down a wing of the school.
One of my brother’s classmates died, if I remember correctly, on a skiing trip, in some accident. I remember the stone grey face of her mother when I met her a couple of times a week on my morning paper route. Broken, beyond repair. Just completely gone. Lost.
A girl in my class, when I was around eleven, was found out to be cutting herself, and her family moved out of town in shame. Never saw her again. If she had stuck around I suspect we might one day have had an awkward kiss at a school dance.
My first crush’s dad had a heart attack, and his son saved his life, eight years ago.
A troubled kid moved schools in and out of my class three or four times over 7 years. Supposedly, his dad beat them. Just the sort of thing “everyone knew”. He moved in with a cousin (my classmate) for a while, but they eventually found him too much to handle. He would constantly get into fights over nothing. He was a big guy. Tough and strong. As I remember it, he was twice the hight of any one of us, but that is honestly just the emotional impression, and memories morphing over time. He was fucking huge though, and dangerous when he lost his temper. Very typical bully character. Never had an altercation myself, but I talked him down from beating up one of my scrawny friends once.
I think about him a lot. First time I met a person with that much rage and fear.
Those are mostly just childish stories, but that’s because I was a child when I lived there. The same thing went on amongst the adults. I just don’t remember a lot of those stories, as these were much more personal and important to me.
When I was 14 I was run over by a car, and spent a while in hospital. Hit my head real bad. When I got out, my first day back to school, I met one of my classmates in the hall. When he saw me, all blood drained from his face, and he grimaced in fear. Stumbled a bit. Then he shook out of it, and it just blurted out of him:
“I’d heard you were DEAD.”
When I chose to move to this city, eight years ago, I did so for three reasons.
1. I wanted to go to university (arguable)
2. My friends from boarding school were all moving here
3. ????????
I hadn't quite articulated the last one. It was more of a sensation than a thought. Some longing, some sense that there was something “out there” in the “real world”, the Big City™. Something, deep down, underneath layers of drugs and depravity, something I could dig at to find, that would help solve my loneliness.
I felt completely alien to my parents, and by extension, their entire world. I had felt equally alien at boarding school, except; one thing had been revealed to me. There were a few, very, very few — but some — people who got me, and that I could get along with. People whose company I genuinely enjoyed, and that I could spent time with without it draining me.
My statistical calculations at the time, made it out to be something like 1 in 5000, roughly. And so, going to a place where there were hundreds of thousands of people seemed like the only shot I could have at finding any of them. And I was prepared to suffer through any and all sort of depravity to find them. To not be so god damn lonely.
That’s what I told myself. Something more wicked was going on, I think.
After my brain damage and return to human society, for years and years I indulged in violent fantasies. After a while, I also chose to pursue them, as best I could while it still remaining secret to my parents. I did not want to endure the ethical consequences, but I fantasised deeply about being beaten up. About starting a fight I could’t win.
Finding some tough guys at a party and pissing them off enough for hands to start swinging. Something like that. Having a fight with some strangers, nameless, faceless strangers, and just — see how it would go. See what my rage was really worth — I wasn't generous in this regard, I didn't suspect it would be much. But I longed for it nonetheless. Violence.
Couple of months back in school, one of my classmates who were part of the high status clique were running past me in the hall, and I stuck out my foot and tripped him, just so he would fight me. A while later, in gym class, I did the same to one of his friends. Both were very satisfying, the latter especially, because I won by a long shot, until his friends came to help him out.
They were good kids, most of them. Before I left for boarding school, they invited me to a party and were really friendly and forgiving towards me, as I got punch-drunk for the first time in my life. They gave me a lot more chances than I deserved. But I was wrecked with envy for their ability to be social, normal, have girlfriends and such. Still cant picture — let’s call him Chad -’s face without wanting to strangle him, and thinking about the time he walked up to me to ask what I was drawing out of completely genuine friendliness, but made me feel exposed and weak, and I fantasized about stabbing him in the throat with my pen.
I innately knew, even back then, that this fantasy had to be secret. When I played the ideal fantasy out in my mind, it was always what I described before. “Some strangers, at a party or something”. It had to be hidden away, never to see the light of day. I was ashamed of it — shame was incorporated in that the fantasy involved losing the fight, but even more, I knew that the event, and even the fantasy itself, had to be secret. Hidden away. That there was something so ugly about it, that I could not suffer it to be made public.
The scuffles I used as examples with my classmates were good — but they weren't quite good enough. I wanted more, desperately so, but any more, any minute degree further than just that level of teenage boy fights, would be public knowledge. My parents would know, and I would have to suffer through their compassion and mothering, ruining the purity of the violence.
I couldn't start a fight, at least not one as bloody and severe as I fantasized about, in public. Because in a small farming community, where everyone knows everyone, any act of violence instantly becomes a shared cultural artefact.
Everyone knows.Everyone talks. You can’t get away with it without judgement. It’s the talk of the town! Everyone knew about the in-and-out-of-school kid with the violent dad. They knew his name, his face, his entire family tree. Everyone knew about the parents who lost their daughter. Everyone knew about the girl I sort-of-liked-maybe-but-I-could-tell-she-liked-me-I-don’t-know-shut-up-you-have-cooties.
But in the city, “these things just happen”.
My friend, M, was walking home from his job as a bartender at around 1 AM, was accosted by three strangers who sucker-punched him, showed him to the ground and repeatedly kicked him in the head, until he was sufficiently incapacitated for them to rummage through his pockets.
And sometime last spring, a man got in a fistfight and almost died on the street, just below the window of my office. And I sat in the windowsill watching the aftermath; the ambulance drive up, paramedics dragging his limp body onto a carrier, and two policemen trying to restrain a grieving wife who was going out of her mind.
No one knows about any of those things. No one talks about them.
None of my neighbours know about the man last spring. I told my room-mates, none of them had seen or heard a thing. None of my mutual friends with M knows about what happened to M.
Hearing about M, talking to him, his reaction to my reaching out to him — how it had an air of surprise about it, finally made it click for me.
He should be angry — he should be furious. He was subjected to meaningless cruelty for no god damn reason.
But he internalised. Because he didn't think anyone cared.
In a city of several hundreds of thousands of people, know one knows a thing. They don’t want to. And there, you can have your secret violence, because no one cares. And that, I think, was really my reason number 3.
There is something inherently immoral about living this close together with this many strangers; something unspoken. Something immoral comes about, organically, from the enterprise. A shared indifference. A culture of allowance. An implicitly agreed upon sort of game, or play, that is acted out, which includes pretending like acts of violence are no one’s business but those involved directly in the fisticuffs.
Had what happened to M happened in my home town, yes — there would be a sense of humiliation from being exposed, such as the humiliation I fled from. But it would be his. The experience would be his and it would be real. It would be remembered. Perhaps for as long as generations. There would be a story about it, M would have a story about it.
Had what happened to M happened in my home town it would have become culture. In the city, it just becomes fog — which is why the streets are always foggy in the beginning of detective stories.
The way you treat post-traumatic stress is being narrativizing the traumatic experience. If you don’t have a narrative, the trauma never dissipates. You think about it, you feel it, every moment of every day. It is an ether, a smog, that fills you up from the inside with utter rage, and a desire to explode, just to feel momentary relief.
And the thing about crafting a satisfying narrative when you've just been beaten senseless, is that it’s very difficult to do — and having it be a communal effort, having eighty people help you structure that narrative, is a lot more effective than doing it on your own. Especially if you’re not the sort of person who thinks a lot about narrative crafting in your day to day. Which, according to my calculations, is about 4999 out of 5000 people. Roughly speaking. Haven’t run the numbers since I was fifteen.
In my case, the narrative I was offered as a kid was unacceptable to me. I wouldn't accept being the brain damaged kid. Weird kid, sure, I was all about that. But I was too prideful for anything I hadn't actively chosen myself.
Nothing is more terrifying than senseless violence. A man can suffer anything, any pain, any indignity — but meaningless violence is hell. And terror — well that’s part and parcel of living in a big city.
