Semper Temper

Depending on my surroundings, I usually get one of two reactions when I meet new people.

If I’m outside Aberdeen, people usually blink several times, chuckle nervously, and firmly tuck me inside a mental folder marked “most wildly eccentric person I have ever met.”

When I’m in my home town, surrounded by members of my family, the reaction never varies: “how the fuck are you so normal?”

Due to a rather inconvenient honest streak, I am compelled to explain that I am perhaps the craziest person in my entire family.

“But don’t you have an uncle that went insane, and pretended to be a sheriff after smoking pot only four times?”

“Yes.”

“But didn’t your sister accidentally call the cops on herself for drunk driving, then proceed to attack four officers, before being shoved in the back of a patrol car, loudly accusing the officers of rape the entire way to the police station?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you, the son of a man who once off-handedly told his direct supervisor that if he ever fucked with his pension that he was going to kill his children, eat them, and then rape the shit he took, are the craziest person in your family?”

“Yes.”

“Really? Even though every time your mother becomes intoxicated she proclaims herself to be Christ?”

“Absolutely.”

“But you’re so nice and accommodating!”

“Trust me, I’m just over-compensating.” No one ever believes.

In the eighth grade, I think no one more than Greg Burns would have praised my sense of accommodation and kindness. Not a day passed that he didn’t spend the greater part of the class period pushing his desk into the back of mine or stabbing me in the back with a pencil, while rudely asking me for answers to his class work. The fact that I had reached my adult height of 6’2” in the sixth grade, and that Greg had yet to push through the glass ceiling of 5’5” runthood even during the middle stages of puberty made the spectacle ridiculous.

“Hey fucker, what’s ethanol used for?”

I laughed cheerily as Greg stabbed the middle of my back with his pencil. One thing I can credit my sister for is this: once you’ve had bits of your face clawed off, nothing much bothers you. “Come on Greg, you know I can’t just be giving you answers like that.” I grinned in an even more friendly manner as he poked me again. From the expression on my face you would have thought that Greg was my greatest friend on earth.

“You’re fat and you look like the Stay-Puffed Marshmallow Man,” Greg sneered. Several other children laughed. There’s something funny about a giant being harassed by a mouse that spreads like wildfire.

I giggled at Greg’s cleverness and huddled over my worksheet, filling in answers as fast as I could move my pencil. I would have to wait until high school until I could get into advanced courses where people like Greg wouldn’t be allowed. As Greg repeatedly pummeled the front of his desk into the back of my chair, chanting “fat ugly fucker,” I wondered if I had been wrong not to give him the answers to his homework. No doubt my mother would have called it selfish of me. During that phase of my life, my mother had watched a movie called “The Boyfriend School” with Steve Guttenberg, and decided that she could simply train me out of social awkwardness, or at least get me to “pay protection” to kids so that they would leave me alone.

Days became months. Greg’s knocking on the back of my chair never stopped. Sometimes it was slow and steady, like the slap of the ocean against the shore. Other times it was fast and passionate, after which Greg would say “I bet you want to get ridden hard from behind just like that, you fat ugly faggot” and then give a high five to the kid sitting next to him. I dug my mind further into my reading materials.

At lunch, Greg would sometimes come up behind me at the soda vending machine, and snatch my dollar bills away before the machine could take them in. I would splutter several statements of shock and then let it drop. Despite my best efforts, I was starting to get mildly annoyed.

There were several things about me that Greg was unfortunate to not know. The previous Christmas, seeing that I had an unhealthy tendency to repress rage, my Grandfather had bought me a punching bag. A week later we had to take it to a leather smith to have the straps reinforced after I had managed to break one. I simply assumed my Grandfather had purchased a defective bag. Likewise, when the stuffing inside turned to fluff and had to be replaced with bags of sand, I naturally assumed that I had had a bag meant for children, and I was simply moving onto the adult version. I had no idea I was supposed to be wearing gloves until my knuckles had already turned to leather and it was no longer an issue. In fact, it wasn’t until my junior year of high school, when my buddy Steve held an old microwave we found in my basement up against his chest, and dared me to punch it that I realized something was up. After my fist had slammed through the front cover, dented the back, and left Steve gasping on the floor for fifteen minutes, I finally realized that perhaps I should make a policy never ever to hit someone unless my life was at stake. Unfortunately for Greg, this restraint did not come until later in life.

I do not remember the day other than that it was spring, and that Mrs. Lewis was looking particularly fetching in a knee length denim skirt. The bell rang, Greg took his seat behind me, and our fifteen minute reading time began.

“Hey fucker?” Greg whispered, “Did you lube up that ass, because it’s time to get fucked!” Greg began to slam his desk into the back of my chair. As this had gone on for several months, the class had become accustomed to the noise.

Something inside me changed. I dog-eared the corner of my book, and turned around in my seat. “Greg, I sure wish you would stop that.”

“I sure wish your momma would suck my dick.”

One positive thing I can say about Aberdeen is that everyone pretty much leaves you alone. One of the junior high English teachers had once locked her students in her classroom, smoked a cigarette, and given a speech about the violent nature of her menstrual cycles stating firmly that she was going to raise her daughter to be a lesbian as no man could ever understand such pain, and had only been issued a verbal reprimand. Unfortunately, when her co-worker husband had gone into the science supply room and masturbated onto a Petri dish so that he could show his class live sperm on the projector, he did not get off so easily… if you’ll pardon the pun. Several years later, a friend of mine who worked at a photo-booth would develop a reel of pictures of the same teacher, freed from the burden of teacherhood and dressed up as a woman at some kind of sex party. The point being this: while I knew my teacher would never stop Greg from harassing me, I also knew that anything I did to Greg would likewise go unpunished.

It’s funny how perspectives change, because when I understood this, I suddenly went from apathetic to being very aware that I was more than twice Greg’s size. I smiled wide and wolfishly. The white around my eyes expanded into an ocean, in which my pupils and irises became small and lost. Greg pounded into the back of my chair, oblivious.

I had not chosen that day. Nor was there any particular rule that led to my sudden mood. When you repress your anger, there is neither rhyme nor reason as to when it will be released. Anger is like Pi. No pattern. A sleight can be reprimanded immediately, or the response can be delayed for years. In the moment of rage there is only the white hot fire of chaos, and a thirst that can only be quenched by another man’s terror.

“Stupid fucker, stupid fucker, fat ugly stupid fucker,” Greg sang under his breath. I got out of my chair. I put one hand on the front of Greg’s desk, and one hand beneath his chair, and lifted him straight of the ground. I raised him over my head like Moses with the Ten Commandments, walked to the classroom door, and kicked it open. I heard Mrs. Lewis turn a page of her Cosmo magazine as I left. I wordlessly slammed Greg’s desk into the ground like Thor swinging his hammer. I stood over him like Zeus, with palms full of lightning. I laughed the hyena bark of Anubis welcoming a soul into the underworld. Before he could recover from the shock, I wrapped my fist up in the front of his shirt, dragged him out of his desk, lifted him up in the air, and pushed him up against a nearby locker.

It’s funny how people can transfer perspectives to one another, because in the same way I had previously become aware that I was much bigger than he was, Greg suddenly seemed to realize it too. He let out a helium wheeze and choked on whatever he had been about to say. I roared like a blacksmith’s furnace, cocked back one of my hands, and swung. The locker door next to Greg’s head caved in like crumpled tin foil.

I brought my face close to Greg’s, until I could feel his rapid pants against my face. I wanted to smell his fear. It was a fragrant perfume more pleasing than a rose garden. The fact that I was not accustomed to cursing, and that the words sounded forced only made it worse.

“If. You. Fuck. With. Me. One. More. Time. I. Will. Kill. You.” I have never again been so sincere in my life. My hand left its clutch on Greg’s shirt, and he fell to the ground like a sack of stones.

Fifteen minutes later, when Greg finally decided to come back into the classroom, he set his desk up as near to the door as possible, and like a man staring nervously at a land-mine he has just stepped upon… never took his eyes off me.