Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #010

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #010 – “The Slap”

Crazy.  I didn’t realize how late I was in getting around to watching The Slap!  When I was checking it out from my couch during the pandemic, it had already been out for about five years.  Not sure how I missed that one if I’m being real with ya.  Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t seen it already.

Should it have been triggering, considering that I lived through it myself?  Probably.

It was New Year’s Eve in 1993, and I was thirteen years old.  We were having an uncharacteristically large gathering of people at our house, which tended to be off limits to the public most of the time on account of my mother’s furious temper and her unpredictable eruptions.  For whatever reason, the family at the time, consisting of myself, my handicapped brother Mathew, stepbrother Jeff, stepsister Stephanie, stepfather Dave, and my mother Shirley thought it would be a good idea to invite a whole bunch of family and friends over to celebrate the end of ’93 and ring in ’94 together.  We cobbled together a list of people we knew from my soccer team, family members we hadn’t seen in years, friends that we probably only met a couple times – basically anyone we’d crossed paths with was seemingly welcome to come eat, drink, and be merry as we finished off the year to go into the next.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s an acceptable time to be loud, is it not?

We’ll get to that.  Suffice it to say for the moment that we ended up with a wild mix of personalities and a range of ages that was pretty remarkable, because it’s not like we were all that popular, you know what I mean?  My stepfather was just about the quietest person you’ve ever met, save for the times he’d be scolding my brother for something ridiculous and beyond his control.  He didn’t have a ton of friends, but there were a few, and presumably most of them showed up for this New Year’s event.  We even had his half-brother show up, our uncle Alan, who really never came out for any reason no matter how much fun it seemed like it would be.  My mother, like I’d mentioned, was either the life of the party or the reason it ended in every situation that involved her, so for the most part, people just learned that it was best to steer completely clear of her.  As I think back on this crazy day now, some like, what is it…thirty-three years later…I can’t see the face of any of HER friends at this party in my memories of it, because she didn’t really have any left by that point.  There were a few that she shared with Dave of course, but if they were to split (like they eventually did), they’d have all left her in a heartbeat to stay on his side of things if they went south (which they eventually did).  We had a ton of folks from my soccer team show up, which was cool because you got additional adults to become a part of the fun, but also a whole bunch of kids that could help keep us occupied and busy while they’d be busy drinking and dancing the night away.  At the time, I was surging through puberty and had become “a man among boys” as my friends would later describe me – I already had chin hairs and a decent goatee by thirteen.  I was a warrior out on the soccer field, and I think it’s fair to say that plenty of kids were looking up to me at the time for some kind of sense of leadership, while in the background I was just trying to figure out how to get from one day to the next without getting into too much trouble at home.  That was virtually impossible.  I enjoyed soccer for the chance it gave me to escape being treated as the villain at home.  Did I deserve to be labelled as such?  Not really…not at all if I’m being truthful with you.  I tried my best not to make any waves at all, because our family was held together with duct tape and pieces of string and I spent my entire childhood knowing that we were one major fight away from a complete implosion.  I deliberately chose not to rock the boat, knowing full-well I could be the one responsible for tipping it right over.  I brought home As and Bs as a student, I never skipped school unless it was something my mom approved, I wasn’t out late drinking – I didn’t drink at all, I was freakin’ thirteen and just trying to find some semblance of normalcy.  Every kid that I knew of at the time that was regarded as some kind of hooligan came from a place of extreme comfort and privilege.  My childhood wasn’t like that at all.  We scratched & clawed for couch cushion coins, and felt like we’d won the lottery if we ever found any.

For the most part, even in roles where I was depended on for leadership, whether in class, at home, or on the soccer field, I was admittedly very shy and reserved.  I didn’t talk a whole lot to begin with, let alone during a celebration for New Year’s Eve.  It just wasn’t who I was, or am now if I’m being completely truthful with you.  I talk a lot here on these pages of ours, but that’s largely because I know that nobody that actually knows me reads anything I write.  Not my parents, not my family, not the friends I grew up with, and I’m quite certain nobody that would have been at the party back in 1993.  So I can speak freely here, because the constant judgement I grew up with simply doesn’t exist at this site.  Anyhow, the point is, I’ve always been a don’t speak until you’ve been spoken to kind of person I guess.

Now ask yourself this – what’s the acceptable level of noise that a bunch of kids are allowed to make, on a night like New Year’s Eve?  As far as I remember, we had a fairly even split between the adults and the kids at the party.  If anything, there might have been a couple more kids than adults, but considering most everybody was popping out three or four kids back then, it was probably pretty common to have that kind of crowd at a large gathering.  As Nirvana was nuts deep in blowing up the concept of family values and peeling back the curtain on what it was like to live a childhood rampaged by divorce, on the surface in 1993, society was still trying to downplay reality and pretend this shit wasn’t happening everywhere you turned your head, in practically every household.  The parents and adults all hung out upstairs in our two-story house, and the kids were all packed into our unfinished basement.  We had a door to keep them all out of where we were, which also served as a barrier to our laughing and playing, and stopped us from having to hear about them all complaining about us upstairs as they drank and played their old-people music.  My bedroom was right in between all this; right outside the basement door, right on the inside of the front door to the house, and at the bottom of the stairs that led upwards.

I want to be as fair as possible in looking back at all this, even though what occurs ends up playing what I’d consider to be a fairly significant role in how I continue to govern myself to this very day now.  I know that we were warned at least two different times about how loud we were being downstairs, and that it was apparently infringing on the good time they were trying to have upstairs – because they could hear us.  I don’t know that that’s all it had to be, but I have my suspicions.  Parties like that aren’t for the kids, they’re for the adults…and even though we were fully contained & entertaining ourselves, we were still supposed to essentially be out of sight and out of mind.  We weren’t.  We were laughing, loud, and I’m sure we were fairly obnoxious to a crowd of adults that were just trying to have a couple beers together.  At around seven o’clock, we received our first warning about being too loud and a polite request to keep it down.  At eight o’clock, we got our second warning and told that was going to be the last one we got.  When things obviously didn’t get any quieter, it was really only a matter of time before an adult would come down to the basement again, but what were they really going to do in front of so many people.  We got loud, we stayed loud, and eventually, probably as a result of alcohol being involved, the adults upstairs decided they had enough, and sent down another representative to tell us to shut the fuck up.

Given that the party was at my place, the kids looked to me to defend our fortress downstairs, and I was all too happy to oblige.  I had no reason to be scared, why would I?  The basement door had a lock on it, it was secured, and if any pesky adults wanted to come in, we would have to be the ones to let them in.  When we got a pounding on the door for what we thought would be our third warning to keep it down that night, a bunch of us went to the entrance, laughing at whomever was on the other side tasked with the responsibility of trying to talk sense into a bunch of kids having a great time together.  We weren’t doing drugs, we weren’t looking at nudie magazines, we weren’t even being bad by any definition at all – we were simply having a good time together and that’s all there was to it.  What a lot of folks won’t tell you in this life though, is that the sound of fun can be extremely grating to those incapable of having some of their own, and it was pretty clear that the adults had become sour on us having any fun at all.

So I went to the door, decked out in my brand-new Los Angeles Raiders football hoodie.  Strange to look back at that now, because I never liked football, but they were popular at the time and that was quite likely the closest thing I had in my closet to being anything that could be described as cool.  I put the hood over top of my head, unlatched the lock on the door handle, twisted it, and strolled through to the other side in a dramatically pronounced way that was intended to let whoever was there know exactly who the real boss was that night.  I remember the feeling of being fearless at one moment, and then completely powerless in the next.  It’s a moment I can see vividly in my mind like it happened yesterday.

Before I even knew who was on the other side of the door, I burst through it.  “Yo, yo, yo – what the problem is?” I said like a thirteen year-old gangster with no real concept of what it was like to actually BE gangster would do.  Without having a moment to even realize what was coming next, the hood over my face was promptly thrown back onto my shoulders, an arm was cocked and loaded, and I was slapped as hard as that arm could cut through the air, leaving my left cheek immediately red as my eyes filled with tears.  I looked up and saw Dave standing there, appearing to be almost as shocked as I was that that had just happened.  Staring at his slapping hand, the beer in his other, and then back at me, it was like he was a victim of his own instincts and reflexes.  I kind of felt bad for him for a brief moment; it was like he was just doing what he had been taught to do on the other side of slaps he’d received from his own childhood, but at the same time, now had to reckon with the fact he’d become an equivalent monster.  He looked terrified and frightened of whatever was going to come next, and I rarely if ever saw him that way.  I was much too young and scrawny to fight back physically at that time, so the only real recourse I had was to immediately engage in mental warfare.  I stared right back into his eyes, letting him know how badly he had fucked up & that he was about to pay a massive price for crossing me the wrong way.

He reached out to try and console me for a second.  I threw up a hand to block his coming toward me, even if he was only going to put it on my shoulder and say he was sorry.  There was no evidence that he would be doing that – Dave had never apologized to me for anything before, not even when he gave away my childhood dog only for him to get another of his own weeks later – so I had no reason to believe he was about to do the right thing & say he was sorry for walloping my face on New Year’s Eve.  I looked around & saw the faces of the other kids I knew from soccer who had all just witnessed me take this punishing slap and felt the sting of embarrassment, much like Dave did as well, albeit for totally different reasons.  I could even hear the constant murmur of adults talking upstairs come to a slight halt as they wondered what the sound they had heard was.  I wanted to yell up to them that what they heard was Dave’s brutal meat-club connecting with my childhood face and to call fucking 911 to get this asshole out of my house and out of my life forever, but that wasn’t how I operated.  Hell, it wasn’t even how society functioned at the time.  We were still at the try to pretend it didn’t happen end of the spectrum, and ultimately, I knew I was on my own in that moment.  No one would be coming to my rescue, no one would be able to change my circumstances, no one could convince me that tomorrow was going to be any better than today was.  If anything, every day afterwards was now threatened to be worse as a result of this shitty precedent being set.  Physical violence was now officially on the table.  Mind you, I’d already survived a ton of encounters between my mother, the wooden spoon, and my endlessly red ass – but that was from a biological source.  Violence from anywhere else seemed unexpected, and like much more of a betrayal somehow.

I pushed past Dave into my bedroom quickly, and locked the door behind me so that he couldn’t get in.  Then, as dramatically as I could possibly do it, I took my dresser and shoved it in front of the door.  Then, when I wasn’t sure that would even be enough, I pushed my bed in front of the dresser and barricaded myself in, permanently for the night.  I had no intentions of coming back out to the party and I felt like I was embarrassed beyond repair.  I heard Dave try to talk to me for a moment through the door before he turned and went back upstairs to the rest of the adults.  A few voices cut through the silence that followed, but it was clear that no one had any idea about what to say, if anything could be said at all.  The kids in the basement all sat quietly now, and slowly, the oxygen got sucked right out of what was left of the party.  The music stopped, the dancing along with it, and the drinks stopped flowing as well.  I could hear the footsteps of people beginning to leave on the other side of my bedroom door, with the occasional voice saying goodbye to me as they packed up and left.  No one was comfortable anymore.

Some tried to stay and salvage the night.  Some simply weren’t in a position to drive.  I had no intention of coming out of my room for as long as I thought I could stay there, but one person managed to cut through the noise for a moment.  It was my uncle Alan, who I really didn’t even know until that night, and I think I only ever saw him once after that before he died.  He was the kindest most gentle soul, and I needed that so much at that moment.  I moved my bed and my dresser just enough to let him into the bedroom, and he consoled me pretty good that night through tales of how much his own old man used to knock him around all over the place.  He stressed that he wasn’t trying to say it was okay or normalize it in any way, he was merely trying to explain that what had happened was unfortunately a whole lot more common than I realized, and he was right about that.  I appreciated his honesty and candor and his willingness to be the guy to try and talk me back off the ledge, because I was getting crazier & more hysterical by the second.  I was screaming into my pillow with unbridled rage and I was genuinely scared about whether or not anything would ever go back to normal again after what I experienced that night.  Alan was smart enough to know he couldn’t fix everything in a situation like this, but he was able to soothe the burning sensation of my face through the calm and cool of his words.  He was a half-brother of Dave’s, so he was well aware that the guy had grown up in an emotionally stunted and disconnected way that was impossible to interact with, let alone become the patriarch of a family that was never his.  He listened to me for as long as I was willing to talk, and I’m eternally grateful for the fact that he did.  When we came to the end of his rum & coke and it was clear that I didn’t have much else to say, he let me know he was going to go back up to what was left of the party, and I re-barricaded myself in my room.  Alone again, but more at peace than I was, I could hear practically nothing from the basement or from the upstairs anymore – the party was pretty much over, and long before it was midnight.  My soccer coach came down to see if there was anything he could do, but the last thing I wanted was for him to see his little warrior fully reduced to a puddle of tears.  I couldn’t open the door for him, so I simply stayed silent until he eventually left, taking his kids and wife back home away from the toxicity.

Eventually, Dave came back down the stairs after everyone had finally cleared out, and he attempted to reconcile the situation to the best of his abilities.  He was completely and totally inadequate and not at all built for moments like this, but regardless, he had no real choice but to try and muddle his way through it.  I decided to let him into my room, and we talked for about an hour afterwards.  For the majority of our time talking, we both tried to avoid the real reason looming over us.  We never talked to begin with, so having to be forced into it now felt even more awful – I think we both just wanted to get through it and carry on with life afterwards as best we could, even though we knew things would be permanently changed from here on in.  We talked about music of all things…something he knew relatively nothing about.  I remember we were talking about AC/DC and Metallica and other crappy things I was listening to at the time, and appreciating that he seemed to be genuinely making an attempt to get to know me at long last, even if it was forced by the circumstances we were in.  I don’t know that I would say I forgave him that night, or that I’ve forgiven him even now – but I do think it was a necessary thing I had to go through in order to become the person that I am now today, and oddly enough, I’m kind of thankful for it.  That’s the thing about the lessons our parents teach us by the examples they provide – whether they’re good or they’re bad, you can learn something significant from them.  When it comes to the many people I’ve called mom or dad throughout the years, it’s almost always been a case of learning what not to do by absorbing the impact of the many mistakes they made.

After a semi-awkward hour of Dave and I talking without really addressing too much of what had happened, he left to go back upstairs and call it a night.  He never officially apologized, and we never talked about it ever again.  My mother stayed completely out of it, and we never talked about it either.  I didn’t bring this up with school councillors, friends, family, or anyone that could have helped me deal with the traumatizing aftermath of such a shocking moment in time that continued to reverberate long after it was over.  I moved out of my home the following year to go live with my biological father, and the marriage between Dave and my mother would last about another four years before it too would eventually disintegrate and seem like the strangest memory of something that’d be impossible today.

Oddly enough, about a decade and a half later when I stopped talking to my mother and emancipated myself forever from her constant bullshit, I managed to maintain a quasi-friendship with Dave.  It’s an adult relationship…we’ve all got’em I suppose.  We still don’t really talk, but we make sure to wish each other a happy birthday every year, and I think that’s about the extent of what we can emotionally afford to spend on each other, given that we have no real reason to continue whatever bond we might have had all these years later.  He remains good friends with a large portion of my family actually, but also doesn’t speak to my mother at all.  In fact, she’s condemned just about every one of us for continuing to talk to the guy, but hey, at least he’s a fairly nice guy in his old age, whereas she’s devolved into an even scarier version of the person she used to be.  I last saw Dave at a cousin’s wedding & we had an amazing time talking to each other.  The entire time, I could see his eyes welling up with tears as we talked, and though I know he’d never admit it or bring it up…I felt like I knew he was revisiting this very moment of the slap in his mind, and that I could see from the way he looked at me that he knew I knew what he was thinking about.  I firmly believe that if he was capable of apologizing, that he certainly would have.  Maybe that’s revisionist history.  Maybe that’s me emotionally compensating for what I so desperately need.  Maybe I’m simply seeing something that was never there at all, and never will be.  I don’t know.

What I do know is that I don’t hate the guy at all, and I like to think I’ve forgiven him.  Maybe it’s that whole Stockholm syndrome type of thing, I don’t know…but there’s a part of me that’s even thankful for having gone through that.  I’m definitely aware that a whole lot of people had it a whole lot worse than I did, and I think the way that the rest of the partygoers reacted proves that.  They could have all taken a stand on my behalf, said that what happened was wrong, called child protective services – anything.  Instead they did nothing, quite likely because at that time, it was something they probably had to deal with in their own homes as well.  I grew up to be a very non-violent person despite some of the most volatile emotions I think a person has ever gone through.  I’d always be way more likely to self-harm than to lash out against anyone else, and the two ‘fights’ I was in during highschool were both solved in a single punch from yours truly.  It wasn’t something I was ever interested in, and even after levelling a couple dudes out with my disgustingly large knuckles, I was quick to apologize and see if they were okay.

Would I have been different without the slap?  Who can say?  I can speculate, but I have no idea.

I remember hearing the song “Of Course” by Jane’s Addiction so vividly when I first got my hands on the album Ritual De Lo Habitual years later.  When Perry sings “when I was a boy, my big brother held on to my hands…then he made me slap my own face.  I looked up to him then, and still do.  He was trying to teach me something…” it was like a revelation…the feeling that I wasn’t alone…an accurate description of how I felt about my own situation with Dave.  I don’t think I ever thought he was being malicious that night, so much as imparting the sad wisdom of the brutality he’d had to learn himself as a child.  Maybe that’s sugar-coating it.  Maybe that’s me making excuses for him.  Maybe I shouldn’t be.  I don’t know.

All I know is that we’re the sum total of everything we experience, good and bad.

Thankfully, I arrived at a place where I can finally be proud of the person that I’ve become.

For better or worse, the slap played a role in that.

I can still feel the harsh sting of it all if I close my eyes tight enough, but I’m grateful for it now.

It’s part of what guides me to this very day…and it’s a reminder that choosing kindness is our real strength.

Thanks for reading.  Love to you all.

Yes…even you, Dave.

– Jer @ SBS