Violent Acts in Appropriate Settings

I came across this piece on an old flash drive recently. I wrote it for Patricia Hampl's memoir class in the winter of 2001. A few stylistic choices aside, I still kind of like it.

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Violent Acts in Appropriate Settings

JIM ON THE PLAYGROUND

In grade school, there was a kid named Jim who could pop his shoulder in and out of its socket at will. I was often invited to “c’mon, feel it, man—it’s so weird!” when he performed his trick. The sight and sound of it made me nauseous, so I politely declined all invitations to experience it through touch.

I think of Jim for the first time in years after my Aiki-Jujutsu instructor shows me the most efficient way to rend someone’s arm from his or her shoulder socket.  He actually uses the word “efficient.” A year after becoming a student of this art, it gets more and more martial with every class I attend. Usually I am not bothered by the casual acts of simulated violence we perform twice a week, but the thought of the strange and horrible bulge that Jim would so often summon from beneath his t-shirt has suddenly made me queasy and uncertain.

I GAVE MY COUSIN A BLOODY NOSE

 At a family get-together when I was six, my cousin (then five) proudly brandished a new cap gun. It was a silver-colored, plastic, cowboy six-shooter, and though even as a child I was never a gun fetishist, it impressed me greatly.

When my cousin was occupied with other toys, I picked up the pistol. I couldn’t get the caps to fit correctly, so I asked him for help. He was very hot-tempered then, and flew into a rage when he saw me holding his favorite new toy. Before I knew what was happening, he had me pinned to the ground and had wrenched the gun from my hands. Holding it by its barrel, he pitched his arm back to strike me with the butt end. I panicked and swung my fist wildly, somehow connecting with his nose and splaying him backward on the floor.

I began to cry when I saw the blood dribbling from his nostrils, afraid he would bleed to death. He began to cry after I did, shocked to be—for the first time—on the receiving end of a punch to the face.

I WAS BULLIED

 Between grades one and seven, I was bullied by a skinny boy. He was popular (or at least I took him to be), and though he was unpleasant to most, he took special care to be brutal with me. His name was Ricky, and he was ugly, with black eyes and dirty blonde hair. When he said something cruel, he spit.

HOW-TO

Kote Mawashi is performed in four steps. It involves twisting your opponent’s wrist and hand inward toward his or her body while slipping under the arm and behind him or her. With each step you take, your opponent’s arm is manipulated in such a way that a specific part of it is damaged:

Step one breaks the wrist.

Step two severs the connective tissue in the elbow.

Step three breaks the elbow.

Step four simultaneously dislocates the shoulder and severs its connective tissue.

Our instructor is a short man. He is a little portly, with small round glasses and a salt-and-pepper goatee. He tells the class what to expect aurally. He says that the arm goes “(1) crack, (2) snap, (3) pop, (4) pop, snap.” His cadence is percussive; he makes learning fun.

TAXIDERMY

The room in which I punched my cousin seems dream-like when I try to remember it. The ceiling was impossibly high, the walls covered in mounted antlers and deer heads. A stuffed black bear stood in the corner, teeth bared, arms raised. There was a wooden spiral staircase that led up to a landing that overlooked the room, and this is where my mother and father, and aunt and uncle sat. This room was a coliseum, and my cousin and I were gladiators. This room was a cave, and we were primitives. Logically, I know that this room doesn’t exist the way I remember it. I am sure, though, that I punched my cousin, and that his nose bled and bled.

THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE

Looking puzzled by the x-rays of my shoulder, the doctor asks me to explain exactly what happened. I can’t give too many details, as I wasn’t aware of the injury as it was happening, but I speculate as to which technique would have produced the tissue damage he is describing. I tell him about Kote Mawashi, and he harrumphs, unimpressed.

“I would have guessed you’d been hit by a car,” he says.

I have never thought myself terribly macho, but secretly, this information pleases me very much. It turns out I’m the kind of guy who gets hit by a car, but then waits a week to go in for x-rays.

IN STUDY HALL

When I was twelve, Ricky challenged me to a fight after school, and I accepted. It was right before study hall, and he stopped by my desk to spit insults at me before taking his seat.

Whatcha doin’, pussy? Whatcha doin’? After school, faggot. Let’s go.

I was angry, and suddenly aware of how small he was, so I said, Okay. Let’s go. After school.

He was silent for a moment, and then a sickly, terrible grin spread across his face. You’re dead, he told me.

THE CAP GUN

My cousin is the only person I have ever really punched.

After, my father explained to me about self-defense. A little later, my cousin’s parents made him apologize. It made no sense. He had a bloody Kleenex stuffed in his nose, and my hand didn’t even hurt.

I don’t know who owned the house or why our two families were there together. I remember there being many toys that belonged to neither my cousin nor me, but I don’t remember there being any other children present. I later learned from my mother that there was no landing, no wooden staircase. The adults were two rooms away, and saw nothing.

I WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO BROUGHT A GIFT

Ricky invited me to his ninth birthday party. I didn’t understand the invitation, and assumed that I must have been included by mistake, or as a joke. Even so, because of who he was, and who I was, it never occurred to me not to go.

His house was a few miles out of town, in a semi-residential neighborhood in which dusty fields and unpaved roads surrounded each home. During the drive to Ricky’s house, I expressed my concerns about the party to my father.  He wasn’t dismissive, but urged me to keep an open mind. Maybe Ricky wanted to be friends. Maybe this was his way of saying Sorry.

How long do I have to stay? I asked him.

I expected the party to be attended by the most popular of our classmates, because those were the circles Ricky ran in on the playground. Instead, the only children at the party were Ricky, his cousin, his two younger siblings, and me. I asked where everyone was, and he artfully avoided the question. I gave him his present, which my father and I had purchased that morning at the drug store. It was a cheap, red plastic, water-powered rocket thing. I had no idea what kind of stuff Ricky liked, and didn’t want to get him anything too nice, since he had been terrorizing me for as long as I had known him. He was happy with the rocket, though, and suggested we try it out.

The backyard was full of adults, who I guessed were aunts and uncles.  There was a keg of beer, and food laid out on picnic tables. We—Ricky, his cousin, and I—moved through the crowded yard to the field behind the house. As we passed, a drunk, middle-aged uncle said, “Great party, Rick!” and then laughed in a way that made me want to get away from him.

We followed the instructions, and sent the rocket high into the air, powered by a stream of pressurized water. We were going to do it again, but it landed on a rock and broke into a dozen useless pieces.

JIM REVISITED

I spend the rest of class trying to imagine the feel of a person’s bones moving in the wrong direction beneath my hands. I imagine pulling a person apart at the joints. I imagine hearing the crunch of collapsing cartilage, feeling a skeleton yield under its skin, and I become lightheaded.

After only one thousand repetitions, any movement—no matter how complicated or hurtful—becomes entirely reflexive, as involuntary as a sneeze.  By the end of class I am convinced that soon I will be completely numbed, able and willing to rip and twist and snap someone apart. I suddenly wish that I was ten years old again, and that Jim would ask me to touch his trick shoulder. “Yes, Jim, yes! It is so weird! Let me touch it again!”

I HAVE NIGHTMARES

When I was young, I often dreamed about being chased. The dreams were regular occurrences until I was about fourteen. Then I began having fight dreams. I would try to punch and kick, but my limbs were heavy and useless. A few years ago, the dreams changed again. Now I am quick, but my opponent is made of rubber, and no matter how I try, I cannot break him apart.

AFTER STUDY HALL

I was petrified. I spent most of the study hall sweating and tapping my fingers on my desk. I watched Ricky at his desk three rows ahead of me. At first I mistook his fidgeting as a sign that he was anxious to kick some ass. But it became obvious, as his knee jackhammered the floor and he kept looking everywhere in the room except at me, that he was nervous.

When study hall ended, on the way to the lunchroom I stopped Ricky in the hall. I spoke to him like a lover:

This is stupid . . .

It’s gone on way too long . . .

I’m so tired . . .

Let’s just call it quits . . .

He didn’t say anything, but nodded and offered to shake my hand. Unfortunately, we never fought after school, and nothing really changed between us.

ONE THING I DIDN’T MENTION

When I punched my cousin in the nose, it felt good.

AFTER THE ROCKET

Ricky and his cousin showed me around the neighborhood. There was a girl with big tits who lived next door, and Ricky’s older brother got laid by her once.  (It is worth mentioning, I think, that Ricky’s older brother was rumored to be in jail for crimes unknown. Later, I would speculate that the reason Ricky was tolerated by our popular classmates was fear of the older brother, who was perpetually on the verge of parole.)

There was a family of Filipinos down the road, and Ricky’s family didn’t like them. I wasn’t quite sure what a Filipino was, but I kept my mouth shut.  There was talk of throwing rocks at the Filipino family’s dog, but luckily, Ricky’s cousin was hungry and suggested we go back to the house to eat. I seconded the motion. Ricky reluctantly agreed, casting dirty looks down the road toward the chain link fence that housed the terrier.

NICE LID

After class, the most fashionable of my Aiki-Jujutsu classmates dons a black fedora with a small red feather in the brim. As we file out of the building, our instructor says to him, “Nice lid.” This groovy kind of jazz talk is typical. Our teacher calls clothes “threads,” and digs film noir. When he isn’t teaching efficient methods of inflicting bodily harm, he teaches theater classes at a private college.

He speaks in euphemisms, but they are severe. He doesn’t talk about killing. He talks about “plucking life.” When he thinks that we are practicing a particularly dangerous technique without thought of its real-life ramifications, he stops the class and says:

Perform each movement with the understanding that you will be held accountable for it.  We don’t do things just because we can.  We do them because we are absolutely sure that we must.

I LEFT THE PARTY EARLY

It turned out that one thing Ricky and I had in common was a love of cocktail wieners. We both piled our paper plates high with them and headed back into the house, so that he could show me his room.

On the way, Ricky’s foot caught on the living room carpet and he fell face-first to the floor, his tiny hot dogs and their sauce splattering across his t-shirt and the cream-colored shag. His mother, whose presence I hadn’t noticed, stood at the other end of the living room. Maneuvering her words around a cigarette, she said, “What the hell is wrong with you? Get off your ass and clean that shit up.”  She then turned to me and, squinting, said, “Who’re you?”

Not long after, I feigned illness so that I could go home. I had to ask him several times, but eventually Ricky gave me the phone and I called my father to pick me up.

It was a long wait since we were so far from my house, and for the first part Ricky sat with me on the porch. Eventually he got tired and angry, and he went back inside. When my father pulled off the gravel road and onto the driveway, I ran to meet him.

THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE REVISITED

It is evident to the doctor that I have not been faithful to my physical therapy regimen. The initial damage done to my shoulder wasn’t that severe, he says. Six weeks of rest and exercises with giant rubber bands should have fixed it. He removes his glasses and frowns, and for an instant, he reminds me of Jim. The doctor asks me to describe again what I do that is so hard on my body.

I begin to explain the art I study (its beauty! its history! its science!), but become distracted by the doctor’s grimace. As he clenches his jaw, I note the gentle, vulnerable depression of his temple. I follow his crow’s feet into the pit of his eye socket, and then out again to the peak of his nose’s slope. His brow is furrowed so that the skin is gathered directly between his eyes, where a quick strike would cause momentary blindness. I mentally trace a line down the bridge of his nose: a sharp, upward blow would produce a break and extraordinary amounts of blood. I proceed down his chin and up his jaw line, where the earlobes end and the jaw is attached so delicately to the skull. All the flaws of human construction are diagrammed neatly in the look of disapproval he wears.

He is not interested in how gracefully the tissue in my arm was torn; he only sees a mess. “The next time you hurt your shoulder, it will be much worse,” he tells me. “And it isn’t in great shape now.”  This is the extent of his lecture, but by the time he’s finished I’ve pummeled him a dozen times over in my mind, where I can afford to be merciless.