🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
Today would mark the 25th anniversary of my first day in prison if I cared to mark such a date. Some days just stick with you forever, though. Memorable days and unforgettable beginnings. Such things have dominated my thoughts, lately. Years ago I saw a Vin Diesel movie that I think was called “Knock-around Guys”. There is a scene in the movie where Vin Diesel asks another guy how many fights someone should have to be in before he can be called a tough guy. That scene always stuck with me because he posited 50 or 100 fights as the number and I remember thinking, so long ago, how low that estimate seemed.
I tried to remember my first fist-fight and I can’t. I can remember what happened when I was 3 or 4 years old, but I cannot remember the first time I was punched in the face. How commonplace does something have to become to be overwritten in the memory banks of one’s brain?
It is oddly jarring to me sometimes to see the depiction or racism in America as white people hating black people. I was born into a neighborhood in an inner-city that was far below the poverty line in this great land of plenty. I know that my experience of black children who hated me because I was white. There were never enough white kids to return those beatings, and we couldn’t even if we wanted to. We all knew we couldn’t be the racist white kids beating on a black kid. That meant I had to learn how to fight, in live action, from a disadvantaged position as a disadvantaged youth.
The kids in my neighborhood never knew we had a “white privilege.” If we did, we probably would have sold it for some candy. All throughout grade school I was in fights constantly. In school we were only made to write 100, 250, or 500 times the same sentence if we were fighting. Outside of school nobody cared as long as it was a “fair fight”, which only meant one-on-one and no weapons. A loss of a fair fight was even met with consequences sometimes.
Growing up with two sisters compounded the issue for me because I was told by my mother, my aunts, friends parents, and even teachers that I had to protect my sisters. So many ass-whoppings I took because of my older sister’s mouthiness! Even the sacrifice of taking that beating was considered protection though. I took it to spare her, though she didn’t spare me by shutting up! I was in more than 100 fights before I finished third grade. I got pretty good at it, too. I don’t say that with any particular braggadocin, just as a statement of fact. The definition of a “fair fight” was changed for me in a way that got me in trouble for fighting kids my own age and size. It just wasn’t fair.
In that world, such violence was an accepted part of life. It was the necessary evil to protect the good. The push to the pull, the yin to the yang. The acknowledgment of the death that lurks in all life. A controlled burn in the release of our anger and frustration at the shackled of poverty that weighed down our souls. Even if there was no conscious awareness of this at that time, there was that passionate building to an explosive expression. Frustration, to anger, to violence.
While I so reveled in the street life at the pliable age of 7 to 9 years old, my mother was working during the day in a bar and going to school at night to earn her G.E.D and then a nursing degree. What I knew as freedom in my lack of supervision wasn’t due to neglect, it was the result of a sacrifice being made to try to better our lives and prospects. As has often proved the case in my life, the sacrifice gained what was sought, then what was sought turned out to be worse than what was initially possessed. Truly ironic.
The summer prior to my starting fourth grade my mother moved us to a white, middle-class suburban neighborhood. It was the nicest house we hade ever seen with a big front yard, its own driveway, an even bigger back yard and it wasn’t connected to someone else’s house. It was so peaceful because I wasn’t getting chased home, jumped, or even called names every time I left the house. That was probably the best summer of my life. It was the honeymoon period, though.
I was still a child, only 10 years old, but I had been trained into a social structure that not only didn’t exist in this new suburban world, but it wasn’t even known to exist in this white suburban conscious. That summer, after countless fights in my life up to that point, the first time I punched a suburban white kid was the first time I had the police called on me for getting in a fight. And the police showed up! That never happened before.
That’s white privilege, but it wasn’t mine. That was when I learned that fighting is actually called assault. I had thought, up until then, that assault was when a man beat a woman or a kid. I never knew one boy could assault another by bunching him. I learned a lot more about assault over the years, too. It was beyond my ability to learn self control over a temper that had not just been necessary but reinforced my whole life. At least to learn it before my temper was necessary again. That goes back to the sacrifice my mother made in moving us out to the suburbs. She wanted to save us from being the object of hate by the black people in the city, but we became the city-kids that all the suburban kids hated, anyway. Now I knew I belonged nowhere.
Instead of a honky, I was called a wigger. Instead of a blue-eyed devil I was a fatherless bastard. Even with a decent wage as a nurse, my mother was stretching her paychecks to live where we did and care for three kids. We didn’t fit in by our mannerisms and we couldn’t afford to fit in with name-brand clothes or new toys and things. We were still poor, but when that was common in the inner-city, it was taboo in the white neighborhoods. Poverty was disgraceful, shameful, and offensive. That is the first time I was ever ashamed of who I was. I could deal with that, though, because I was well versed in losing by then and yes, I measured nearly everything as a win or a loss. What I couldn’t take was seeing my sisters ashamed of themselves. This taught me another nuance to assault that I didn’t discover in the city.
I fought to protect myself and my sisters a lot. One thing that was always taken as granted was that a defeated foe was an end to the fight. Once someone gave up, it was over. That was sacred. I lost that naivety in fourth grade.
I don’t remember what my younger sister was crying about, or I may not have even known the nature of the teasing that caused it. I just remember one boy laughing at her, and pointing. There was no slow build from frustration to anger. There was no controlled burn up to a release. I erupted and Pompeii shook. I was no superman so no fire flew from my eyes, but fury bled from my soul and blood flew from every hole in that boys face when his eyebrow split, his lips were mashed between knuckles and teeth, and his nose pulped into his cheek.
It was far from my first fight in that school, but it is the first fight of my life that I would label as an assault. I say that because I never hit someone out of pure hatred until that moment. I only wanted to hurt him and I did not stop even as I was being pulled off of him by teachers.
The truth is that I wasn’t appalled. I know the teachers were absolutely horrified, but I felt cleansed. I didn’t realize that I had been crying as I beat on this other boy and I was dead silent. It felt like I had been drained of all feeling and was left an empty vessel ready to begin anew. I felt freed.
Looking back now I see the shock of the traumatic loss of self control I experienced. I also recognize, at the same time, how that self control felt like shackled and chains for so long. To be hated and despised, to be beaten and ridiculed, and to know no haven except those few within my inner-circle: Such an arena builds a level of resentful hatred that eventually escapes its bounds. The binding that was self-control had snapped.
My life, that day, turned a corner. I left the neighborhood of “good kid with a temper” and got on the turnpike to “violent criminal.” It was a long road to that destination, but every journey begins with a first step.
Sole, meet pavement: The journey has begun.