Violence

I have spent much of the last 40 years trying to figure this out - Why was there so much violence in my life?

I have 4 sons, two of whom were in grade school in the 80's and 90s, two of whom are in grade school now. Not only have none of them ever been suspended or been forced to march up to the principal's office for fighting, none of them have even had a fight that I'm aware of. My oldest son did get his face busted in HS, but that was not as a result of a fight - it was a random act of violence by a troubled kid from another town, already in "the system", who cold cocked my son with brass knuckles. No words, no warning. But not a fight, either.

When I grew up, where I grew up, fighting was just part of living. Beginning in fifth grade or so, the average kid got in perhaps 2 fights a year. Usually they happened at the playground, usually after school, but fights were known to break out at recess or gym class as well. In the early 60s there seemed to be some unspoken rules about how teachers and adults handled it, which could be summarized by "boys will be boys", whatever the hell that meant. If you got into a fight, as long as nobody got a bloody nose or a black eye, the fight was broken up, you got a stern talking to, and that was that. Sometimes the fight would resume after school, but the teachers (mostly women) were not responsible for keeping the peace 24-7. Most of the time, tho, the reason for the fight was forgotten pretty much as quickly as the fight had broken out.

The ones that resumed after school were particularly brutal. There had to be real, long standing animus to impel such events. Kids would look forward to these "street fights" all during the school day like fight fans anticipate a heavyweight championship fight. The fights themselves were nasty - kicking, biting, punching, lots of blood, and only ending in one of the combatant's humiliation. That's what these fights were all about - inflicting and absorbing humiliation.

By the mid 60s the deal had changed. Maybe it was because we were bigger, stronger and more prone to injury and injuring. But it seemed like in general schools had had it with fighting. There was no particular litigious reason for this - it's not like there had been an uptick in suits against schools or insurance claims. It was just a change in the Zeitgeist - fighting was not to be tolerated at all.

The deal became, you get in a fight, you go to the office, and you probably got suspended. I am here to tell you, this was a very bad idea. Four decades later, I STILL think this was a very bad idea.

What this policy did was make those who had nothing to lose by being suspended, the "troublemakers", more bold, and those for whom the worse part would be dealing with their parents when they got home, the "good kids", more timid. This policy basically invited the trouble makers to make more trouble with effective impunity, and force the good kids into the role of ready prey, and be punished for afterwards for it to boot.

I often said then, only a woman would come up with this policy. That's unfair, I know, but we had just gotten a new principal, and she was the one that laid down this new law.

And of course, when the inevitable happened, and you found your ass cooling your heels in the waiting area of the principal's office, waiting for one of your parents, usually your mother, to come in, if you were the prey you just seethed at the injustice of it all. Some kids got suspended even when all they did was cover their heads as they got wailed on. Didn't matter. Got in a fight? Gettin' suspended.

And the other kid? They were lucky if they could even locate that kid's parents. Generally, they didn't care - that's why the kid was a troublemaker. Duh! One time tho one of these kid's fathers did come in. He didn't wait to talk to the principal. Instead, he went right up to the kid, smacked him around, and then basically kicked him out of the office and down the hall. That was pretty bad. For once, justice.

When it happened to me, my parents had very different reactions. My mother lectured me on how it was unacceptable behavior. My father wanted to know if I had held my own. This was typical, and typical of the age. My mother was quite a by the book idealist, but the old man was from the street - and the old country. His parenting philosophy was "hit first, ask questions later". When President Kennedy was shot, late in the school day, I ran across the street home to tell my father the news. He was in the bathroom, shaving, getting ready to go to his second job, and was not in a good mood. "Pop - President Kennedy's been shot!" Without a second thought he wheeled around and smacked me across the face. "You don't joke around about something like that!" In shock, it took me a while to regain my wits and talk him into turning on the TV.

I was the tallest kid in my class from 5th to 8th grade, and one of the strongest, but I didn't want to fight if I could avoid it, irrespective of the consequences. I was too strong to be beaten, but not mean enough to beat the other kid up. What would ensue would be these ridiculous clinches, the other kid red with rage, and me having let the emotions of the moment pass. We'd dance around as he'd try to trip me to take me down, and I tried to keep him at arms length. Then a teacher would come and off to the principal's office we'd go!

What a waste of time, and what a pain in the ass.

So what I would do is try to disarm my opponent with jokes, trying to make him laugh, trying to give him an opportunity to save face by pushing off while the spectators laughed at my jokes. This strategy worked pretty well for a while.

Unfortunately, one time when I was in 8th grade, a 7th grader mistook my joking around as a sign of weakness, something to be mocked. He started to make fun of me, in front of my peers. His taunting was mean spirited. I light heartedly warned him to stop, and a few kids told him not to mess with a kid much bigger than he, but he persisted. I was being humiliated and, given my upbringing, I was vulnerable to getting enraged when humiliated. It was one thing to get into a fight during a football or basketball game due to some misinterpreted contact. I could let that go. But humiliation I was not able to let go of easily.

I changed the expression on my face and warned the kid, who was kinda straddling his bike, to stop. He kept on. I walked up to him, put my face in his, and told him he better fucking stop. He didn't.

I snapped. When it was over the schoolyard had emptied, my hands were sore and bloody, but not with my blood. That poor kid was on the ground, whimpering, bleeding. You could not tell where he began and his bike ended. He cried and cried as I huffed with afterrage.

I didn't help him up. I didn't say anything. I just stood there, over him, huffing, letting my rage unblind me. I was horrified. It was intellectually obvious that I had done the damage, but it was like I had come upon the aftermath of somebody else's handiwork.

He didn't ask for help or beg for mercy. He just wailed. I stared for a while, then turned and walked slowly home.

As I trudged I was in disbelief - did I do that? Am I responsible for that? To this day, I have never forgotten that moment, nor have I fully forgiven myself.

In 1968 that event was less than a year in the past. I had managed to avoid one on one fights since.

Then I made the mistake of walking into a pizza parlor at the same time that some drunk older kids were walking out. We bumped into each other. They didn't take it kindly.

I knew who these guys were - they were actually out of HS and in college, locally. Despite the fact that I was with three other of my frosh friends, I was the same height as these older guys, with a full beard. And let's not forget - they were "sensorily impaired".

They proceeded to push me around in the tiny vestibule of the pizza joint. I knew their reputations - they were bad guys. I pleaded my case, with the best defense I could think of - Hey, I'm a freshman!

A freshman, see? Picking a fight with a freshman when you were a junior or above was like picking a fight with a girl. There was no honor in that - in fact, it would detract from your rep if you were going around beating the shit out of little freshmen. But they didn't believe me.

My companions were obviously freshman, much shorter than I, years from shaving. They tried to help me out. "He is! He really is a freshman." This also had no effect. The drunk guys grabbed me and dragged me out in front of the blank wall on the side of the building.

I continued to plead my case. C'mon, man, what's the big deal about beatin' on a freshman? But these guys were getting ready to wail on me.

So, confronted with my new reality, I quickly calculated that I had one chance. I could get in a few shots if I acted right away, maybe knocking them off balance. Them being drunk and me being a sprinter, I figured I had a pretty good shot to run the two blocks into the woods before they could get up, amble to their car and come after me. In theory.

So I did it - Pop! Pop! I thought they were two pretty good shots. Apparently, not good enough.

I got the shit kicked out of me pretty bad. What they lost due to inebriation the wall I was up against made up for. To their credit my companions did not scatter but stayed on the sidelines at a distance until it was done. I was able to protect my face, so only my body took the brunt, and my arms. They lost interest, weaved their way to their car and sped off into the night. My friends came over, helped me up, and told me how bad I got my ass kicked. But in an empathetic kind of way, if that's possible.

I hadn't been looking for a fight, and had I entered the pizza parlor a minute earlier or a minute later, I would not remember that night.

But such was the quotidian violence that was my life at that time.

My freshman year was also my first year in an integrated school. We had had one black kid in my 8th grade graduating class. But we were a sending district for a larger high school district, and that larger district was largely black.

I had no problems with blacks. I had played football in 7th and 8th grade with them and they respected me. I had played music with them in a band program, making friends with two really nice guys, one of whom would go on to be student council president in HS when I was his VP. And I had had a great act of kindness bestowed on me by a black HS kid when I was in fourth grade and had fallen down on the asphalt basketball courts in the schoolyard and scraped my knee quite badly and bloodily. None of my white friends came to my aid. The HS basketball team had a summer camp at my school, and none of the white guys on the HS team came to my aid. But one of the black guys did, helped clean up my wound, helped me on my feet, and made sure I was okay. I had no reason to hate blacks, and lots of reasons to feel okay about them.

Nonetheless, things were tense in high school. Several times fights broke out, particularly in stairwells, probably because they were out of the eyesight of any teacher. These fights, called rumbles, would gather a crowd, the white kids chanting "Fight! Fight! Nigger and a white!", the black kids chanting "Kill that honky mutha fucka". I stayed clear of this kind of crap, but it was there, and with some frequency.

But in my life, even the teachers were a threat. Remember Mr. Apito? Well, he was buddies with my cousin on my mother's side, a guy named Sonny, who was also a teacher in the school. I guess they thought I needed some toughening up, because every once in a while, when I wasn't on my guard, Apito would grab me from behind and pull me into a doorwell. He would hold my arms behind me while Sonny would punch me in the stomach. Weird, huh? But what am I gonna do? I would tighten my abs and let him wail away. It would only last 10-15 seconds, then they'd let me go and pat me on the back, calling me a good sport.

Was this normal? Did I ask for it? Was I that much of a wise ass? Were other kids jealous of me? Did I come off as so much of a pansy that even the adults felt like they needed to toughen me up?

Maybe I had something to do with that, but even still, independent of me, there was other violence that engulfed me.

Our high school got in so many rumbles with other schools at sporting events that we got to be known as the "riot school". It seemed to start in my freshman year, and ultimately wound up with two major riots in the school itself, one requiring the State Police SWAT team, the other, in my senior year, the National Guard. But that was years away. There would be so much trouble in my freshman year that basketball games, forever the province of the winter night, were moved to the mid-afternoon daylight hours as a deterrence to violence.

My introduction to this larger environment of violence came at the first varsity football game of the season. It was a close game. I was on the freshman team so I wasn't suited up and was instead in the stands. I wasn't watching the game much, intent as I was in flirting with a gorgeous girl named Carol, who happily returned the flirting. (We soon went steady for the requisite month. I went to her house. She introduced me to her mother, "Doesn't he look dumb? But he isn't! He's smart!") Ultimately the game ended with us winning 25-19, on the road. The home team fans didn't like the outcome apparently, or perhaps it was something else, but all of a sudden a riot broke out.

In those days most of the fans at a HS football game, always played on Saturday afternoons, were students, kids. Few if any parents were there, few if any adults. (This might have been abetted by the fact that our parents were blue collar people in the kind of jobs that had shifts and afforded days off during the week, rarely on weekends.) So when a fight would break out it wouldn't take much to become a riot, since there was a lot of fuel, as it were, to add to the fire.

There is a painting by an artist, Boccioni (an interesting figure who spanned every turn of the century school from Romanticism to impressionism to pointalism to cubism) named "Riot in the Galleria". Altho it is a painting, and obviously a still impression of the event of a riot (oddly, among women!), nonetheless it is an eerily accurate portrayal of the circular, cyclone/hurricane like violence that sweeps around and around during such a phenomenon. I recommend viewing it. I have a print of it in my dining room to this day.

A riot can break out quickly, spread quickly, engulfing tens of people, then just as quickly and for no apparent reason, suddenly dissipate. That's what happened here as well. Carol jumped into my arms. (She had beautiful, large breasts, so it was an odd mix of fear and lust that overcame me at that moment...) Before we could figure out what to do, where and how to flee, the riot dissipated.

These things don't stick with you at the time. They register in the agenda of events of your life. They have no emotional truck. It was violence. Part of life. Nothing remarkable. It is only now, 40 years after the fact, that I reflect on how actually unusual it was, how outrageous, for young people to be exposed to so much violence in so many avenues of life, all of the time.

Playground. Pizza parlor. Stairwell. Classroom. Stadium. Home.

Nam.

Everywhere, violence.

And how much, I still wonder, was me?