People I Punched
Both dudes
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People I Punched
The first person I punched in the face was Brian S., in fifth grade. He was sitting across from me in our basement cafeteria that smelled of cheap bread. He was calling me fat, and he kept doing it. He was a heartless little kid, endlessly amused with himself. As I recall I leapt over the table, over paper bags and trays and milk cartons, and started to pound his face with my fists. Being pulled off of him I thought, “It’s just like on televison,” but mostly I was full of rage.
We were both sent to the principal, a hen in large fake pearls and blue pumps who thought it was 1950 instead of 1977. Brian was still snickering, I had not managed to hurt him at all. “Girls and boys at our school must not fight,” the principal said.
I said, “I wish I could hit him some more.”
“You must promise that you won’t ever hit him or anyone again,” she said. Also, we were supposed to apologize to each other.
“Sorry,’ said Brian sneeringly.
My father came in to get me, Brian and I were both suspended for a day. My dad was really mad. Usually his anger made me feel bad. I didn’t feel bad at all. I cared about only one thing: myself. “I am not sorry, and I am not promising anything,” I said. He got madder but when he saw it had no effect on me he just sighed and shrugged.
The second time I hit someone was in 2000, at the Fiona Apple concert where she walked off stage, at the Roseland Ballroom in New York. This was before the iconic non-concert started. My friend barely bumped into this guy and she said “I’m sorry!” and he said “Watch where you’re going you stupid bitch,” and I said, “Fuck you, asshole,” and he said “Shut up you fucking dyke,” and I just jumped on him and started punching him. He was huge, I was barely getting anything in there, but he was surprised and I think really drunk. I was just one or two drinks drunk which gave me courage, but with still-decent motor skills. “What the fuck” he kept saying, as he protected his face with his hands. I think I kind of fell off him, like you fall off a wall you’re trying to climb.
What a weird night.
I mention this only because it’s my one successful moment of physical aggression: I once pulled a woman out of a taxi.
It was my taxi. I had hailed it, and it had stopped for me, in pouring rain. My friend was slightly behind, running toward me up Sixth Avenue, about to get into the taxi with me on the curb side, when a woman and some guy jumped into it from the street side. “Get out,” I said, leaning into the open window. “This is our taxi.”
“Finders keepers,” the taxi stealer said. I’ll never forget that. It’s the ultimate thing to say if you’re truly curious about what can happen after.
She was smaller than me, and maybe twenty-two, with a self-satisfied little face and a tiny purse. I was about thirty and all my stuff was in my pockets. “Seriously, get out of the taxi,” I said. My friend was now standing next to me.
“Make me,” the woman said.
I opened the door, grabbed her arms and pulled her onto the street. It was so easy. She weighed nothing. “You crazy bitch!” she screamed. “Jared, help me!” she screamed. The guy was already out of the taxi, just standing there staring at his feet.
My friend and I got into the taxi and headed to Billy’s, on First Avenue. “That was amazing,” said my friend, who was English, and, I found out years later, probably a spy. “Really surprising how enjoyable that all was.”
We talked about how it was not a good practice to take someone’s taxi.
In ninth grade I beat the shit out of a whole bunch of bullies.
They'd been making my life hard since any of us had got big enough to more than toddle. Small-town boys are often like that. But I'd spent eighth grade at a boarding school for boys of ill repute. I grew three inches and lost thirty pounds that year. I also learned a lot, including that there's no getting away from people with whom you have to share a bedroom. If somebody has a problem with you, sooner or later you will have to sort it out. Also, the quickest way to take the fight out of anyone with eyes and testicles is to go straight for one or the other first thing. Be terrifying, and don't stop till you're sure he's sure he's had enough. You don't want to really hurt him, but you can't let him think he might have won.
It's not the way you ever want to solve a problem. No matter who makes it necessary, it's dangerous to be in a fight. But some problems refuse to be solved any other way.
Most of the time there's a kind of stylized etiquette between a bully and a bull-ee. Cornered, the victim is expected at most to make a few pro forma and ineffective attempts at self-defense, and then to curl up and take more or less whatever the bully cares to hand out. To respond instead with immediate and energetic violence constitutes a shocking impropriety. It violates even a relationship built itself on violation. I think sometimes that demoralized them, if not as much as the violence did. Easy to beat up on a queerboy. Not so easy to live it down when the queerboy rears up and beats your ass in front of people you know. Sooner or later you stop taking the chance.
To their credit, the school administration showed no more partiality here than they had at any point prior. Small-town men are often like that. In letting yourself be made a victim you earn a little pity and a lot of contempt. Fighting back earns you respect, even if you lose. I was mostly winning, and nobody in power raised a hand to make me stop. I'm sure it helped I never made it really ugly, and I'm pretty sure some of them were quietly pulling for me. Had they not, I think I must soon have been expelled. And stupid as I'd thought them, I had to grant my erstwhile bullies the speed with which they learned. The year started in August and by November we were done.
I'd sort of had friends before, but someone who draws trouble is rarely safe company. Now I found I had friends in earnest. They told me of a rumor that, between the boarding school and my father's notoriously cruel second wife, I'd finally snapped somehow. Why not? Everybody knows you can't fight a crazy guy. Everyone deserves to save their face. Fine if they left me alone, and they did. It was a lot more fun to kick a hackysack, anyway, and less bruises. Later on I even had a boyfriend, but that's another story.
This story, the one I just finished telling, I haven't told too often. People get caught up on the violence as violence, and fail to notice that it's also communication. It's a story I'm proud of being able to tell, and sometimes that seems to make people think I'm a little weird, too. Maybe I am. Last year I stood for a while two feet from a nest of hornets, empty-handed, in shirtsleeves. Wasps won't sting for the sake of it, even drunk. They always have a reason. But, like cats, wasps meet the world on their terms and no one else's. Their reasons are their own, though we can learn them. But they're just trying to live, same as us. I never had to be afraid of getting stung.
They didn't especially trust me, sure. I think that's fair of an inch-long hunter-gatherer to whom I may as well be a walking mountain. There was always someone on the nest, and she was always watching. But wasps raise their wings to say "back off", and hers never went up. Later that year, near the end of the summer, I happened on one of their younger sisters sleeping off a drunk on my front porch window. Have you ever seen a sleeping wasp? They rarely spend a night away from home. If you ever do, watch her antennae and her breathing. You'll see they sleep like we do, in phases, sometimes restlessly. They build with skill and work with diligence, and learn each other's faces. They make friends, make enemies, have fights, make up or don't. Sometimes they hug it out, and they're very fond of social touch.
They do different kinds of work, and specialize somewhat. Foragers find resources, then memorize landmarks to develop complex flight plans that might be a mile long or more. They teach these routes to their sisters, and navigate them day after day to haul back masses of water, nectar, prey for the babies, and wood pulp for the builders. Builders shape their brood cells precisely and measure them to the millimeter, so they fit just right for the babies to come. They know when to build cells, how many, and where, and which can be reused. They expand the paper envelope that helps protect their home. Nurses feed the babies and keep them clean, and send the foragers after what they need to grow up big and strong. Each wasp in different times of life might do all these jobs.
They share food, share labor, and share the company of their family. They work together to raise their baby sisters, and ferociously to defend them. The occasions of their days mean as much to them as ours to us. Their lives are as full as ours, if by our measure shorter. They're very beautiful, besides. I know they have three times our legs and only half the hands, and they don't bend like we do. We envy them their flying. So what? They're still beautiful. But people mostly never think about anything but the violence of the sting. They fail to notice its communication.
Chris Rock is a little guy with a big mouth. Somebody like that can lots of times cross a big guy and get away with it, but not always. Sometimes the little guy says too much, and the big guy decides he has a point to make. That's what happened at the Oscars. If he'd meant anything more by it, he wouldn't have pulled his punch so hard it turned into a slap. I think Rock played it up some, but maybe not that much. Either way, it was a good one. Didn't really hurt him, but I bet it stung like hell.
I never did drag anybody out of a cab for want of an umbrella. That seems to me like an exercise of power for its own sake, an act of violence in answer to no remotely sufficient provocation. It's not a language I care to speak, though I once knew lots of people who did. But it's a very New York sort of story, and I live in. Baltimore.
I've only ever punched one person. Another girl. One of my "best friends." (She wasn't really, but freshmen in high school don't have good judgment.) It was completely out of character for me, and I don't even remember what it was over, which probably means I should regret this now.