Broken Vessels (7 page)

1977

T
HE
J
UDGE AND
O
THER
S
NAKES

I
WILL CALL
the girl Jan. She was fifteen on that autumn night, early autumn, a warm Sunday night, the baseball season not yet ended. The young male who attacked her I will call Nick; he was twenty-one. Jan was sixteen by the morning of the trial in December. At the trial, The Judge referred to Jan and Nick as Eve and Adam: “What we have here is a typical case of Adam and Eve and the snake in the garden.”

I suppose The Judge was trying to be colorful, to sound experienced and wise; but to me he seemed bored, impatient, and finally angry. He was also inaccurate. Jan was not seduced into tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge; nor did she persuade Nick to share her sin. She did not cause The Fall, and the condemnation to mortality and the sweat of the brow. And she and Nick were not banished together, to enter the world, to mate, and have children. She did, though, pour what she called punch onto Nick's car and its upholstery. One cup of it, with perhaps a swallow or two gone, purchased at the Midway Pizza and Subs on South Main Street in Bradford, which is part of the city of Haverhill, Massachusetts.

There were, though, some snakes: six or eight or more punks, males in their late teens or early twenties. I can call them neither boys nor men. It is possible that I recall my boyhood with a nostalgia that distorts, that too partially compares those years in the early nineteen fifties with what I see now. But I do not believe this. I would vividly remember seeing a boy shoving or striking or choking a girl. Certainly in the adult world, behind windows and walls, men were beating women. But not where we could see them, even when we were sixteen and drank in the two night clubs that, in Lafayette, Louisiana, would serve us liquor; and the other clubs in nearby towns, where we drank and played the jukebox, sometimes with dates, sometimes without: four or five of us boys at a table, drinking gin bucks or Seven and Sevens or bourbon and Cokes or Falstaffs, and smoking Lucky Strikes or Philip Morris from brown packages, and wearing ducktails and suede shoes. Not even in those clubs where older couples drank and danced, college students and working people: cheerful and feisty Cajuns and Creoles, with accents whose source was eighteenth-and nineteenth-century French, and a few drawling southerners, most of them Protestants. Not even there, in the dark and the music, among couples who were lovers or married, and so on the dance floor and at the tables there were elements of violence: passion and heartbreak as tangible as the sweat soaking through their shirts and blouses, and dripping on their brows, their cheeks.

But we never saw a man hit a woman; and if we had, I know that the other men and boys would not have watched. They would have left their girls and women at the tables and on the dance floor and swarmed on the woman-hitter before the bouncer or bartender could reach him. In the Marine Corps I knew a staff sergeant who told me of sitting one night at a bar in San Francisco. A couple beside him were quarreling. Then the man slapped the woman, knocking her off the stool onto the floor. The sergeant got up and punched the man and knocked him to the floor. The man and woman then turned on the sergeant, the woman using a beer bottle on his head, and during his beating the sergeant realized they were husband and wife, and so vowed never again to interfere with marriages, save on an adulterous bed. But that was in the late fifties or early sixties, and my high school and college years in bars were in the fifties, and everything has changed now, and no one seems to know why, and I don't know why, and to blame it on female liberation is I believe not too simple, but too shallow.

I spent much of my boyhood as a moving target for bullies, both the perennials who bloomed each fall and lived in the classroom and at recess through the school year, then in May were gone; and the occasional bullies of summer: boys on a baseball diamond or at the public swimming pool or at the golf course or dances at the community center. When I got my driver's license at sixteen, I weighed 105 pounds. The following summer, construction work and beer-drinking gave me twenty more. Then I was a high school senior. Then I was an eighteen-year-old, 125-pound college freshman, destined by my body and my feelings about it to enter a Marine officer candidate program. I record these pounds because for a long time, much too long, I believed they alone were the scents that drew a bully as garbage in the sea draws sharks. My two sons were both small boys, and they drew bullies too, until the oldest, while still in high school, built himself a new body with barbells and dumbells, and the youngest simply grew broad and tall and strong. The bullying did not stop, though, until each of them had stood his ground and fought and won and learned that inside his body each had a spirit which demanded respect from itself, and would prefer injury to cowardice. My sons are grown men now, and we often talk about bullies, and what they did to us, and why they did it.

Our size was not the scent that drew them. It was our faces, and our movements in the world: as much as we tried to walk, and sit, and talk with confidence, we were transparent. And if our motions and voices did not betray us, our lips and eyes did: they showed the discerning eye of bullies what a wiser person, perhaps an older girl, may have recognized as the roots of vanity. What the bullies saw in our faces was fear; not fear of physical injury, as we believed then, but of humiliation, not only from the fists of a bully, but in all the forms it took in our boyhoods: public mistakes in the classroom or athletic field; not on written examinations, but mistakes our classmates could see. The bullies chose us over other boys who were as small, because a bully's distorted focus is, like any pervert's, out of proportion. The bully saw in us not the whole boy our friends saw, but that fulfillment of his need: boys who would bear anything from him with no resistance at all, save hiding or running away.

My sons and I realize now that bullies never fought. In a classroom of boys from the first through the twelfth grades, there are usually some fighters. They are not bullies. They are easily provoked and at once become motion, action. The ones I knew were good company, most of them athletes, and I respected them and warmly drew safety from being with them. They walked on a different earth than the bullies did: we were in the same classrooms, and on the same playgrounds at recess and at athletic hour, but the fighters and bullies moved about, oblivious of each other, like wild animals at an African watering hole when the predators are not hungry.

When the fighters were nearby we were safe, for the bullies retreated into their strange — and estranged — dark selves. Once, when I was a boy, some of us promoted a fight between our bully and one of the classroom fighters, who also fought in the boxing ring. I do not recall how we did this, but since we were cowards we probably used lies, whispered into the fighter's ear that the bully had said this, and that, and so forth. After school we gathered behind a canebrake: three or four Iagos and the two boys we used, and I imagine my comrades in cowardice felt the same cool shiver of self-hatred that I did, the same glimmer of recognition: that now we were the bullies, hoping for catharsis through the body and — we did not know it — the spirit of our boxer. The bully did not fight. He took the pre-fight abuse that boys use to increase their adrenaline until they can throw a punch, indeed cannot do anything but throw a punch: the bully took shoves and insults, and retreated and denied the reason for a fight, and so denied us. He was a dark-skinned Cajun boy, and in the new pallor of his face I saw my own fears. And still was too young to know the meaning of that pale and frightened face.

Our fighter was bigger than the bully, and I thought again it was all a matter of size, and hated my lack of it, and walked home from school with that self-pity steeped in remorse that rose from a sin I could not name. The bully was, in fact, as small as I was; our only differences were his muscles, and my soft arms and cowardice. And the cowardice was not, as I believed, physical: it was broader and deeper than that, and touched nearly all my public actions. Its source was a frightened absorption with myself that spawned pride and vanity as often as cowardice: the A's in school, the fluent and falsely humble answers in the classroom, the virtuous and solemn face returning from the Communion rail to the pew, where I kneeled and bowed my head and closed my eyes and, as the Host dissolved on my tongue, I prayed with the fervor of the painted profile of Christ kneeling before a large stone in the Garden of Olives, asking that His cup be lifted. Kneeled and prayed that way for anyone to see, and I believed that everyone but those kneeling in front of me saw, and that was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.

I have outgrown that, and I believe my sons have too. We talk of a man we know who one morning shaved the beard he had worn for years and went downstairs for breakfast with the family and no one noticed; and of a woman I know, who for over twenty years was the only cigarette smoker in her family, and her husband and several children wanted her to stop, and teased her, begged her, scolded her; finally she did stop, and neither her husband nor her children were aware of this, and at dinner after her first week without a cigarette she finally told them. And my sons and I are able now to laugh, to say: No wonder those bullies beat us up; they
should
have. We know now that if we had fought the first bully who harassed us, we would have saved ourselves years of torment.

Because of all this, and I hope a sense of justice as well, I become enraged whenever I see the strong bullying the weak. And when the weak one is a female, my rage is deeper. Because with girls and women, it is all a matter of size. Few women, no matter how courageous, can defeat a man in physical combat, if both she and he are normally made. So what was — or still is — in the hearts of those snakes who watched while Adam beat Eve, Nick pushed and struck and choked young Jan?

I understand them less than I understand Nick, and I understand very little about him, or about the young woman who was with him that night, his girlfriend who not only continued to be his girlfriend after his assault on Jan, but was in the courtroom in December, waiting to take the stand and commit perjury. But I can recognize Nick's rage, and his girlfriend's loyalty. The unrecognizable emotion, for me, is whatever stirred and churned inside the ones who watched. It was not fear that held them; they were Nick's friends.

Because these punks abound, I have in the trunk of the car an axe handle. Two autumns earlier, in 1982, also at the Midway Pizza and Sub, some of these snakes beat up students from the college where I used to work. The students were foreigners, and I believe there were three of them. The beating was on a Saturday night, and I heard about it the next afternoon, and Sunday night I lay awake until eight o'clock in the morning. The anger and pain that turned my bed into a cage, and changed the silence of night into the imagined sounds of fists and feet striking flesh and bone, had nothing to do with townies and students. I had no such loyalties; I often told students that my children were townies, and so was I. Nor was I disturbed because the students were foreign; if they had been Samoans — I suppose there are small ones but I have never seen one — or Japanese sumo wrestlers, or if they had been well-built young men from any nation; or, lacking the physiques, if they had possessed that certain earned or sometimes feigned aura that deters bullies, they would have simply gone into the place and bought their food and returned to the campus. These Middle Eastern students on that warm Saturday night were small; the bullies assaulted in a pack and beat them at will, beat them until none of the students could rise from the sidewalk.

I did not spend all of that long Sunday night imagining the beating. The Midway is on the main street of Haverhill, and is between the bar where a poet and I used to go for nightcaps, and the street where we lived. So during much of that night I thought of Mike and myself driving home after our beers and seeing the punks again, with victims or a victim. What would we do, since we had no choice but to get out of the car and force a gang to cease and desist?

Because of horrors inflicted on too many women I love, I carry a licensed handgun when I go with a woman to Boston. Lately, because one is liable now in America to turn a street corner and walk into lethal violence whose target is of either gender, and of any age — a small child, an old woman or man — I have begun to carry a gun whenever I go to Boston. As much as I have thought about it, I still believe I do not carry it for myself, would not even use it to protect myself, except from death. This is not bravery; I simply don't care if someone takes my money, and don't particularly care if someone decides to pound me about the head and shoulders. In either case, I would not resort to a gun. There is nothing wrong with taking flight, if you are the only target. On that insomniac night in the fall of 1982 I decided I would not carry a gun to my neighborhood bar; that if I felt a need to do that, it was time to move to Canada.

So I considered weapons. I wanted one I could keep in the trunk of the Subaru, one that I would use only to prevent or try to stop local violence. I suppose I believe that nearly always we are unprepared: we have forgotten first-aid training, we don't know where the phone is, we are alone and weaponless and have no skills in what are strangely called the martial arts, or in boxing (an underrated skill: in a bar when I was in high school I saw a state champion high-school boxer back down four punks whose belligerence turned to obsequiousness when they heard his name; they knew his speed and power, knew their numbers only meant that he would knock four of them to the floor, rather than just one); so I also believe that many — not enough, but many — newspaper stories we read about people doing nothing while another human being is in trouble are stories not about apathy but about not knowing what to do, and the stasis of fear that accompanies that condition. I suppose I believe, too, that if you are prepared, you will not suddenly be in the midst of trouble. If you know what to do when someone has an epileptic seizure (I learned one afternoon in Haverhill, frightening on-the-job training that left me in near shock), and have in your purse or pocket a tongue depressor, then someone will suffer a seizure out of your field of vision, standing some three blocks away in a movie line. If this means I believe in luck, then it follows that I believe in bad luck more than good. The optimism in this is the belief that if you are prepared, you will not be called upon, and can go about your life in peace.