I hit a girl once. I’m not proud of this. I was in seventh grade, smack in the middle of a three-year stretch of misery known as junior high. This girl, a blond-haired freckle-faced HELLBEAST, enjoyed tormenting me. I was an easy target: I was pudgy, good at school, and worst of all, I really wanted to be liked. I knew the popular kids didn’t like me, but I couldn’t seem to help myself from trying, again and again, to get them to like me.
Like I said: easy target.
I was substantially luckier than many: I had a nice (if small) group of friends, several of whom I’m still close with today. The torment was verbal, not physical, and took the form of taunts and mocking, not horrible soul-destroying meanness. But it was still pretty brutal.
Memory is a funny thing: I cannot remember what it was that freckled hellbeast said that day that caused me to temporarily snap. But I can picture, with perfect clarity, the middle school soccer field where our gym class was playing. I remember the reversible gym tshirts we were wearing, mine turned to the white side, hers on green. And I remember that whatever it was she said was so mean, and I was so fed up, that as she turned on her heel to walk away, I spun around and clocked her… with a palm to the back.
Okay, so it was hardly as hard core as a punch to the face, but I vividly remember the instant afterwards. I was horrified, convinced that I was going to be sent to the principal’s office, suspended, never able to get into a good college because I was a juvenile delinquent.
What happened instead surprised me: freckles looked at me, stunned and a little afraid, and ran away. I waited for DAYS for the other shoe to drop, but she never told.
I never got into another physical altercation.
Until this weekend, that is. This weekend, I got into a physical fight at a Vampire Weekend concert, of all places. Preppy hipsters gone wild! Wooo!
As you might have guessed, I did not start it. I was with some friends at the general admission show. If you’ve ever been to a general admission show, you know there’s some jockeying for position, as everyone tries to find a place to stand where they can glimpse the band through the crowd. We arrived at what we thought was a good spot, when I heard someone behind me say “oh HELL no.”
We looked around and behind us, slightly to the left, was a couple- a man and a woman. The woman was seriously displeased.
“You’re fucking HUGE!” she told me.
Um, nice.
“I’ve been standing here for half an hour,” she said. “You’ll need to move.”
I was starting to move back when, all of a sudden, she grabbed me by the waist and shoulder, and SHOVED me backwards behind her. Then, still shoving, she yelled “I mean, how would you like it if I did this to you, manhandling you and standing right in front of you? You’re fucking huge! [ed note: again! Thank you! You’re a fucking nightmare!]” All the time, still with the shoving. Lots of shoving. And some fingernails in the forearm.
“Look,” I said “I’M MOVING. You did not give me a chance to move, you just called me huge and started shoving me!”
“Well, you ARE!” she said.
“Well, you’re kind of a bitch!” I said, cheerfully. “Congratulations!”
I wish I could tell you that I got her thrown out or that it escalated into some frat-boy fantasy orgy of hair pulling and tshirt ripping, but the reality is much more benign: we moved so we spent the balance of the concert standing about a foot behind them. Jittery from residual adrenaline, I fantasized about pouring my beer over her head while the band played peppy Paul Simon Rhythm-of-the-Saints-esque tunes. And then the show ended and we went home. Anticlimactic! Good times!
Postscript: because this experience reminded me of my only other physical altercation in 7th grade, I decided to look up Freckles McHellbeast. Does it make me a terrible person if I take some comfort in the fact that she appears to have spent too much time in the tanning booth in college and now has skin that looks like luggage? If so, I can probably live with that.
