Large Fierce Mammal

Everyone now living is the product of tough, and as necessary rough, people, whether your 21st century sensibilities like it or not. Those of my own memory and upbringing were the kind of stoic, hard working, hard swearing, hard drinking, won’t take shit from anybody kind of folks who abounded in those days. It may seem ironic to the lost generation, but all the aforesaid being true, there was no carnage in the streets because in a world of people who won’t take shit, very little shit gets offered.

What follows is not intended to prove myself a badass (it was high school folks), nor is it to glorify violent measures as the be all and end all of conflict resolution, in the school yard or anywhere else. Society has bought into the idea that no expression of taking a firm stance; by thought, word, or (Heaven forbid) deed; has any place in the world. In this day of “microaggressions” where we are expected to regard events through a hypersensitive and even “gendered lens”, we find a “safe space” wherein even a stellar student in innocent possession of a workplace tool but who forgot his pocket knife was still in his backpack after morning chores on the farm, can be effectively expelled in a zero tolerance knee jerk to such “implied violence”.

I graduated from high school in 1975, and by today’s standards, most if not all of the good I’ve done in life would never have happened due to a combination of a criminal record and prison time. In the time these events occurred, I was an avid and experienced outdoorsman, never seen dressed absent the Swiss Army Knife in my pocket, and the 3.5 inch Gerber Folding Sportsman hunting knife in a leather pouch on my belt. It was all good, to the point where I was routinely asked by Teachers and fellow students to to cut things, and on one occasion was actually called out of class when a Teacher sent one of his students to my home room door to request the assistance I and my knives could provide. Even back in those days, not everybody carried, but those of us who did weren’t looked upon as brigands and incipient serial killers. I mention this because my knives, present and ready to hand though they were in every case, played absolutely no part in what you are about to read.

When I was in high school, I attracted the attention of four bullies, each in need of what Marc MacYoung calls an “educational beat down”, or EBD, that I was called upon by circumstances to provide. The first was the ring leader of an entourage of cling-ons, the second a late bloomer who woke up one day deciding that his road to popularity lay through me. The third was just an asshole who blew in out of nowhere, and the fourth was someone I met at a week long Summer season seminar in New Brunswick to which I was sent on recommendations by several of my Teachers based on my being their darling.

All three scenarios began with name calling which I ignored. Inevitably, this was incorrectly interpreted as fear and weakness, and so it escalated to physical contact. While all of the events leading up to the day each abruptly ended were observed and registered by people in authority, nobody preemptively spoke to me about how I felt, nor did they approach the perpetrators to warn them off. In fact, I never asked them to, and to their credit, neither did they reprimand me in the clear aftermath of my own solutions.

I hit 6 feet tall when I was 11 years old. I was physically active in the extreme which, combined with being prepubescent, created me very spare of frame. My physicality then, while too fit and nimble to be described as scrawny by anyone who knew what they were looking at, was certainly skinny, and I towered over everyone even appoaching my age group from that point until the end of my high school career. It’s said the nail that sticks up will be pounded down, and I discovered being tall to fit that description. Unlike the nail though, I had the option of having a meaningful dialogue with the hammer.

The first case began the year I turned 16. I simply discovered one day that I had attracted the attention of a mouthy male a year younger who was emboldened by his gaggle of six or so ass kissers to hurl taunts at me. In its earliest days, this started off the school grounds, but when I left it unrecognized it soon entered the school halls until it was happening during class changes and recess. This continued for an entire school year. Summer there was no contact, but things renewed themselves with vigour early in the next session.

It was class change, and the halls were crowded. I had been asked by a Teacher to carry some books from his room to my next class, and so as I headed down the stairs, my arms were fully loaded while my best friend in those years walked beside me carrying my own baggage as well as his own. I was two steps down the first flight of steel stairs in an unyielding concrete stairwell when something hit me hard between my shoulder blades causing me to pitch forward. To save myself, my arms reflexively opened releasing a hail of hard bound text books onto everyone ahead of me, including some who were on the next flight down. Things slowed then in that way they do in car accidents and Dog attacks. My right hand caught the rail as I fell, causing me to spin clockwise 180 degrees. My feet found the stairs and when I stopped I was uninjured but facing back the way I had come, both hands now on the rail and looking into the laughing face of the mouthy male who seemed over the Summer to have decided pushing people down the stairs was a good idea.

I remember seeing his expression change to terror, and a moment of epiphany in which the realization dawned that this motherfucker had just intentionally done something that could have killed or crippled me. The next memory is of me astride his chest, his ears and hair in my hands, snapping the back of his head repeatedly against the floor as his eyes rolled in his head and a voice from far away yelled, “Stop! Stop! Jesus Christ, you’re killing him!”

If I pick up a coconut in the supermarket and knock it against the floor, I can still recapture the moment.

And then I couldn’t reach him anymore because my best friend was dragging me off, and I realized the voice was his. Still sitting on the floor straddling my victim’s knees, I looked around me to find a circle of gawkers that included the Teacher whose books I’d been carrying. I heard moaning and saw the formerly mouthy male’s head lolling from side to side in semi-consciousness, simultaneously marvelling at how little blood there was and thinking how I was going to hear about this before the end of the day.

I didn’t.

There were no repercussions, nor was the matter ever mentioned in any official sense. In fact, aside from my best friend who suffered from Catholicism and so could not stand idly by and condone anyone being murdered by a Protestant, it became a dead issue. At best, an illustrative anecdote.

After a week’s concussive convalescence, the recipient of my EBD returned to school devoid of any desire to interact with me. As an interesting aside, and in case it’s bothering you, in the aftermath of the affray, the books I’d been carrying were still in the stairwell. My friend and I gathered them up and delivered them to their destination as originally intended. I would point out that in those days, they weren’t left untouched because anyone considered the area a “crime scene”.

The next matter was short lived, and occurred the following year when I was 16 and had only just done my first solo in a Pipe PA-28 in my quest for a private pilot certification. I could fly an airplane before I was licensed to drive a car, and can honestly tell you that for me at that age, another kind of epiphany dawned as I was granted the vote of confidence by my Flight Instructor with a double bang on the cockpit roof and the words, “Off you go now! Come back and pick me up. Don’t bend it!” In that instant when the wheels leave the ground, no matter how confident you may have been with an experienced hand riding the right seat, the singular aloneness brings a realization that perhaps for the first time in your life, there is only one person in the world who will get you back alive. For me, it was both sobering and life changing. To say I had respect for my FI is an understatement, leaving me in no doubt that if I did auger it in, he’d find a way to come after me.

So I had an even greater confidence and sense of self-worth on the day the late bloomer first called me “Spaz” in the hallway. At the time, I had no idea what the term meant, but it was clearly intended as an insult for others to see delivered, and had no precedent in our prior interactions. Two days of no reaction from me and the same person “accidentally” shoulder checked me in the hallway as we passed. The next day, I was tying one of my sneakers in the gym locker room in readiness for phys-ed class when he entered the room, saw me side on to him with one foot on a bench, and headed toward his locker by way of striking my ass with his right hip on the way past. The collision propelled me forward and rolling onto the floor from which vantage I saw two things – the transition of his expression from mirth to uncertainty, and my other sneaker lying on the bench less than an arm’s reach away.

The first two fingers of my right hand were nestled in the heel of that sneaker, counterbalanced by my thumb under its sole, as I sprang from the floor. My position in front of the only exit left my now horrified assailant with no option but to flee into the shower stalls where I found him cowering in the last one down. There, I wailed blows upon him until the sound of his sobs and screamed pleas finally broke through to some kernel of mercy. I stood over him, noting how he now wore the marks of my sneaker treads on his forehead, one cheek, his neck and forearms.

I left him there, re-donned my school clothes, and abandoned gym class in favour of the library where I did homework until the next class. Nobody came to look for me before then, and when I took my seat there, a certain person was missing. Someone the Teacher conspicuously failed to inquire about until he appeared ten minutes in, with long sleeves, teary red eyes, and sneaker marked face. Again, not a word of butthurt was issued from on high, although to his credit, my target came to me afterward to offer his most heartfelt apologies. He admitted his actions had earned him the result, we left the matter there, and I am most pleased to tell you that we became the best of Friends. I came to know him as one of the most honourable Men it has ever been my privilege to meet.

The third subject was of an age that should have transcended his still being in school at all, and hindsight tells me he came from a home that contributed to the nature of his brief flirtation with me. He was that kind of kid who blows into your school from out of the blue and immediately tries to establish himself by causing shit. I suddenly found myself the target of threatened bodily harm from someone I’d never met before. This time, and because I had a wondrously open relationship with my school’s Vice Principal, I discussed the matter with him resulting in the miscreant being “talked to”.

There followed a week of relative peace marked by sneers instead of words, and then a singular day that combined a fall of heavy, wet snow with a necessity for me to leave school early for reasons I neither recall nor that matter anyway.

The walk home passed parallel with the high chain link fence that marked one boundary of the Lunenburg Tennis Club. It was as I came abreast of the fence that the first snowball passed close by my head and buried itself in the snow to the left of the sidewalk. Looking back, I saw my latest admirer, too far back for effective snowball accuracy, but closing fast and in the process of forming yet another projectile.

I would NOT run, but did increase my pace. Something easy to do when you wear a 36 inch inseam. Another snowball splashed onto the sidewalk in my wake, followed by the sound of slushy footfalls at the trot. I turned my head again, making eye contact as my new friend slowed to match my pace, now close enough to start kicking slush up the back of my legs. I stopped and turned to face him. He stopped too, at a distance of 10 feet or so. As usual, his expression of self-assurance changed abruptly, and then he took to his heels.

Growing up in a town where it was normal for what passed then as “well kept” Dogs to run at large, I had drilled into me why you must never run in the face of a confrontation with one. It’s also well documented from battles going back to antiquity that the real slaughter begins when one side breaks and tries to flee. This was kind of like that.

His flight took him on a secondary path convergent with the aforesaid chain link fence, but he was no match for my speed. I caught up to him well short of the fence corner and , without slowing, I grabbed a hand full of his hair in one hand, and the bottom of his parka with the other, propelling him the remaining length of the fence with the right side of his face pressed as hard as possible against the chain link. Running off the corner, I released him to collapse in a sobbing heap and a spray of blood on the snow. I honestly thought I’d removed an ear, but it still hung there, giving me relief that I wouldn’t have to help him look for it.

Again, no mention, but he and his bruised face with the stitched on ear only returned to school for a few days before disappearing from my ken … until just a few years ago.

Decades after the incident, it fell to me to appear as an expert witness in a court case, and as I stood in the court house lobby hobnobbing with some lawyers, cops, and court staff I should know better than to be seen talking to in public, I observed another person looking at me under furrowed brow. I was in uniform with clearly displayed name tag, and as I watched, his eyes dropped to read it. It was when his hand flew to his oddly shaped ear that I felt not only recognized, but still loved.

The last incident was likewise the result of someone I’d never met taking umbrage with me by targeting my temerity at daring to be 6 feet and 5 inches tall, brilliant, eloquent, and unbelievably good looking. It was the summer between grades 11 and 12. I was 17, self-confident, and unwilling to take shit from anyone who couldn’t lay proper claim to the right to dole it out.

The venue was Mount Alison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, and my reason for being there was the annual United Nations Seminar. The point of the exercise was to bring students considered to have “the right stuff” from schools throughout Atlantic Canada and the New England States together to foster international understanding by way of a simulated UN. For purposes of this discussion though, it lasted a week and I had a great time, notwithstanding that every moment of down time was dogged by a shithead from Halifax who bestowed the name of “Stretch” upon me from the moment we met on the evening of the first day.

Names mean nothing, and can be equated with the barking of a Dog as one passes by, but as usual, politely ignoring intentional insults from someone you’ll have to rub up against regularly inevitably leads to physicality. It was the morning of the final day. There had been nothing but noise from my paramour all week long, until I was exiting my dorm room for the final time to find him doing the same two doors down. He looked my way, smirked, and then made a point of shouldering me as he passed before turning back toward me with his hand extended in “friendship” saying, “I gotta hand it to you Stretch. You take a lot of shit.”

The ensuing bitch slap of my right hand on the left side of his face caused a spasmodic flailing collision of its right side with the wall of the corridor, leaving him rubbing a reddening perfect hand print as he lay on the floor in confusion. I left him there and went to the assembly hall from whence a bus would take us to meet our train. I never saw him again, although something said to me by one of our keepers as she saw me off led me to believe there had been a betting pool on how long it would take.

In closing for today, if you think what I’ve described here represents “violence” as the rest of the world understands it, you are criminally negligent in your interpretation. Most particularly if you are charged with raising or teaching children, or hold elected office in Canada’s Parliament. Neither zero tolerance policies in schools nor viewing events through a “gendered” or any other shade of lens would have brought about the firm and final resolutions I’ve described here, and would in fact have limited the options of the one who settled them – me.

As the Father of two boys, I take this to the most extreme and fundamental definition of seriousness. They’ll grow up understanding what I did and why I did it – don’t start the fight, but never hesitate to finish it.