The hardest part of telling any story is getting started. The beginning is as good a time as any.
How does a man wind up in a war? The same way he winds up in Carnegie Hall.
I lost this fight at six.
No shit, there I was. Laying in the dust of my mother's garden with ants on my dick, and Sam Meck kicking me in the ribs.
I'd been climbing high up in a tree when the other kids came home from school. They made a beeline. A couple of them found long sticks and poked me until I fell. Eighteen years later, a doctor in Baghdad would tell me my left arm had been broken that day. But since an X-ray would have made Jesus sad, all I knew then was I had a useless arm, and a lot of pain. Didn't make it past the garden before they caught me.
Most of the boys hadn't touched me yet. Sam and his little henchman Guerrito were the instigators, the leaders. They'd gotten the sticks. The rest of them just fanned out and seemed happy to spectate. The pom squad of trash society, drifting along within the group opinion, cheering for the good guys, cheering against the bad guys, so certain they know which is which. I hated them most of all. How pathetic and vile, to be cruel and also cowardly. Sam was a different, more immediate problem.
I was a weird kid with a weird family. We were in a faith healing cult, warned against interacting too much with “the world”. We'd always be a target and as the oldest I was going to be the first to deal with it. Already the neighbor kids had begun tormenting me and my retarded younger brother. And what was my skinny ass gonna do? I was a theology nerd; sensitive, intellectual, thin and uncoordinated. Sam was still kicking me. I needed a plan.
My options were limited. Parents were strict pacifists. Foxe's Book of Martyrs was very much required reading. Involvement in any conflict would result in punishment. There were no justifications for violence, so the only thing I was allowed to do was take the beating. And then turn the other cheek or some shit. God's will was for Sam to keep kicking, and for me to forgive him when he got done.
Weird to notice. The ants were crawling on me immediately when I fell. Must have landed right on the mound, shorts were a bad idea. Tick- tock motherfucker, this is the logic of violence. You get to figure it out in pain, with limited time before your ability to resist is gone. My arm really hurt.
Short answer, I'm screwed. Nothing I could have done would stop the beating. But long term, what's the play? Already thinking about tomorrow. Got to have a plan.
I could hide, but can't do that forever. We live next door.
I could stay inside with three infant siblings and an increasingly insane mother. Not a great option.
We'd played baseball a few months before and Sam got hit in the face with the ball and he bled everywhere and started screaming like a bitch. Mom said to play careful with him because he was a hemo-something..... a kick landed on my bad arm. There was blood and dirt in my mouth, snot and tears streaming in thick ropes.
The reality was that people are mostly cowards. The four boys ranged around watching a kid beat another kid. I remember neither their faces nor their names. They hound after the misfit, the outcast, the different, but only when it costs them little. All I had to do was raise the price and maybe they would drop out. It wouldn't stop the beating now, and it would mean getting punished by my parents later. But they'd know that picking on me wasn't free. The next time, maybe there would only be four. I was an optimist then.
I rolled into Sam's post foot the next kick, curling my bruised stomach into his sneaker as it struck, capturing his legs together at the ankles. Shrieking, I pulled him down. He fell badly. I threw a leg over, sat tall on his chest and hit him with a big rock I'd been laying on for the last thirty seconds. Then again. With each swing, his face opened wide, white skin over red flesh over white bone. Blood was flying everywhere, spattering my arms, shirt and the bean plants. My own bloody, muddy mucus hanging from my chin in long strings, dripped onto the little green alligator on Sam's shirt. Strange the things you focus on at times like this.
Guerrito piled into me, followed by all the other boys. Small fists rained down as I tried to cover my injured arm and rolled to the fetal position. I was giggling and sobbing and dry heaving and spitting dirt. Crazed, wounded. Sam was crying and saying he had to go home. The boys were pushing off of me, and then.... The sun was warm, the roto-tilled earth soft, the ants still mobile, tickling. I lay there a long time, trying to get hold of myself. It was time to pay the bill.
A long walk fifty yards or so to the house. Mom cleaned me up, told me to stop crying like a baby and wrapped my arm in an Ace bandage. Then she paddled my ass with a wooden spatula and sent me to my room to wait for dad to get home, when I'd get the proper whuppin.
I wasn't scared of a belt any more. It wasn't going to hurt more than what had already happened. The dread that a kid normally has when they must wait for a punishment was gone. Only rage, self-pity, and a sense of betrayal remained. I'd been sent out into the world with “turn the other cheek” as my only tool. That would never happen again. A promise, and with it, strange elation.
I could see Sam's face when I had come off the ground. His eyes were dumb and confused at first. When I hit him the second time, he was scared, frantic. In that instant, the tables turned, briefly and forever. That feeling stayed with me the rest of my life. It's the tiny black radioactive core that powers me, warms me, resolves me. This was what I was born for, this was what I was meant to do. No theological argument or academic interest would ever hold a candle to that sort of pain and power.
In time, this decision would cost me and a great many people a great many things. But I was six at the time, and learning my first life lesson. No matter the odds, the outcome, the rules, the commandments from on high, I could make the world bleed.
No gods, no masters.
Just us and these rocks, sunshine.
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Notes -
There's no thunder to steal mon frere. I'm just a broke-dick old soldier telling tame stories to the civilians. You chime in whenever.
You touch on something I'll be talking about soon enough, the social transmission of masculine skill and value. The hierarchy of men, and how far it has fallen. And where, in small pockets, it still exists.
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