Respect

Respect

          Nate Bierman’s mum had been born Japanese, in Kyoto; his dad had been born Kiwi – Samoan-Scottish-Maori-Jewish – in Te Kuiti; Nate had been born in Hamilton, the younger of two, and had lived his whole life there.

          His sister Sara was five years older than he was. She’d always made no secret of how much she resented him. For one thing, he’d been a cute little kid and had siphoned off entirely too much attention that rightfully should have been hers. Then, when she’d been twelve and he’d been seven, their mum had started working full-time and Nate had become Sara’s responsibility.

          She’d always bullied him shamelessly, treating him as if he’d been some toy insect that existed in order for her to torment when she felt like it, and when put in control of him she’d definitely taken control. Without having read any how-to manuals on the process, she had innately employed a wide range of techniques for psychological control – taunting, humiliating, setting unfair standards, threatening, guilt-tripping, fault-finding, belittling, and so on – embedding a foundation of fear, mistrust, and self-doubt at the core of Nate’s psyche.

          It had also been when he was seven that he and Bronnie had become attached to each other. They became childhood sweethearts, and married right after high school. Having money, if little time, their parents had supported them through uni, as they were both bright when it came to school stuff.

          It’s not surprising that as their minds had matured they’d gone in different directions, and at the age of forty-four, after twenty-six years of marriage, with Bronnie barely noticing his existence for about the last fifteen years of them, Nate found himself divorced.

          Bronnie had been the one with business savvy and an eye for a dollar. Nate’s head had never been far from the clouds. His mind rejoiced in mathematical problems; he liked to read philosophy. The political situation always captivated and dismayed him, but he lacked the self-confidence to try to do anything about it or, being seriously deficient in the way of social skills, to join a political grouping.

          He’d remained mired in a mid-level statistical-analysis position at Ruakura, which was okay with him. He didn’t need Bronnie’s well-earned money. Still, with his principled financial contributions to their son Jason, now at uni himself, he’d had little left in the way of discretionary income until right after the divorce went final, which was when a texting turd in control of a Daewoo had killed his parents, with them leaving him a bundle. A Wow!-that-much-really?-sized bundle. Even with Sara, by that time living in Queensland, getting half the loot, money was no longer any problem for him.

          His entire range of romantic experience having been with Bronnie, he had never in his life been on what people consider to be a date, and had no experience with flirting or reading subtextual signals.

          Sure, during his marriage with Bronnie women, mostly Bronnie’s friends, had unmistakably come on to him maybe eight or ten times, especially after the marriage had become one in name only, but he hadn’t been interested. When he’d married her he’d made some promises, and he felt that if he broke his promises to her he could break his promises to anybody. He didn’t want to be the sort of person who breaks promises, and he didn’t want the stress of deciding which promises to break and which to keep. Those women had only come on to him because he was married to Bronnie, anyway. A power trip. After the divorce they’d all made themselves scarce.

          He was lonely, of course, and was more or less surrounded by attractive women at Ruakura and at the gym where he exercised three times a week, but he had no idea at all about how to get on with connecting with any of them.

          Being in statistical analysis, he was glued to his computer screen at work, with few if any opportunities for casual chitchat leading to flirting, not that he’d know how to do that, anyway.

          When a woman smiled at him, was she just being polite? He had no way of knowing.

          The thought of obtrusively invading somebody else’s personal space uninvited horrified him. Impossible.

          The thought of placing himself – his self – in a position to be rejected as unworthy, or laughed at, terrified him, as he could still feel the pain of Sara’s vicious daily dismissals of his personal worth, so that deep down he knew without any doubt at all that he was indeed unworthy and ridiculous.

          The women had other things on their minds, anyway.

          He was too old.

          He couldn’t dance.

          He couldn’t fake self-confidence.

          Short, dark Sharon in admin, for example, both attracted and terrified him. She seemed to be awfully nice to him when they ran into each other, but when he saw her sitting by herself in the tea room during break he just couldn’t bring himself to go over and ask if she minded if he sat with her. He just couldn’t. He wanted to; he told himself that he was going to; he made firm resolutions to do so, but every time the situation presented itself he just couldn’t.

          Big, blond, muscular Toni at the gym seemed always to have a bit of a joke when they came across each other between apparatuses. He began to watch her to see if she was like that with all the blokes, but she wasn’t. He was following her, kinda, after the workout one evening when he observed her climbing into a new-looking BMW sports car and zooming off. That was it. He definitely wasn’t her type. He wasn’t a car person and couldn’t imagine becoming one. When his money had come in he hadn’t bought a flash new car. Shit, he hadn’t bought any new car at all.

          He decided to give online dating a go. At least that way he’d know that he wouldn’t be intruding.

          The number of New Zealand dating sites for people over 40 that Google coughed up for his perusal astonished him. He picked one more or less at random, filled out the profile information, and uploaded a year-old photo of himself. His requirements for a match were few: non-smoker, non-religious – oh!, and not into cars.

          He paid what they asked for with his Visa number and started scrolling through the profiles of those available. He was tired by that time of the evening and it felt too much like going to the Pak’n Save, so he went to bed.

          In the morning he had a message on the website from a woman named Jan, who said that she was in sales. Her profile was appropriately vague, and her photo was unremarkable, so he answered her and after messaging back and forth three times, revealing nothing about each other except a penchant for vagueness, they arranged to meet for drinks at the Easy Tiger – her suggestion – at seven the following evening.

          The day had been hot and the summer sun was still hanging in there when Nate got to the rendezvous establishment about five minutes early. He scanned the room, saw nobody resembling Jan’s photo, sat at the bar, ordered a tall glass of chardonnay and soda on ice, and waited.

          And waited.

          He watched the people in the bar, all of whom failed to fascinate him, and waited.

          He finished his drink and ordered another, and waited.

          A bit after seven thirty, his second drink by then little more than the melt from some ice cubes, he shrugged, figuring that he was no worse off than before, and headed out onto the footpath.

          He’d strolled just a few metres up the street when he heard a somewhat husky female voice call out his name.

          He turned around and, sure enough, there was Jan, just like in her photo, only wearing a shitload more make-up, which emphasised the creases in her facial skin more than it concealed them. This was a woman who’d enjoyed plenty of sunshine in her life.

          ‘Well Nate, standing me up, are you?’ Nice ice-breaker, that one.

          He took a deep breath and wondered how to respond to that bullshit semi-question. Direct was best. Don’t play the game.

          ‘Uh, Hello Jan. Good to meet you. I thought you were standing me up.’ He shrugged. ‘You did say seven o’clock.’

          ‘Oh, come off it, mate! You do know that when a lady says to meet her at seven she really means that she expects to arrive at seven-thirty.’

          He stared at her blankly for a moment.

          ‘No, I didn’t know that. If you expected to be here at seven-thirty, why didn’t you tell me?’

          ‘Because,’ she was explaining something obvious to a dim child, ‘if I’d told you seven-thirty I would’ve had to wait until eight to show up.’

          ‘So the whole point is to make me wait.’

          The child had seen the obvious: ‘Right!’ He was surprised that she didn’t add, Good boy! ‘It’s a lady’s prerogative, eh?’

          ‘Oh, I see. I’m sorry, but I really didn’t know that …’

          ‘Well …’ Okay, her tone of voice said, she was getting ready to be magnanimous and forgive him. She reached out for his elbow and began to turn back toward the bar. ‘I suppose …’

          Nate wasn’t ready to be abjectly forgiven. ‘And I still don’t know it now.’

          She dropped her hand from his unmoving elbow. ‘Oh, come on! You’re not one of those tight-arsehole people who have to have everything on-the-dot-just-so, I hope.’

          He shook his head. ‘It just sounds like a load of misogynist bullshit to me.’

          ‘What the … ?’

          He was just getting going. This couldn’t be what dating was all about. ‘You’re telling me that all the billions of women in the world – every one of you – justify being dishonest – I mean deliberately lying – because it’s part of some sick power game? I don’t believe it.’

          She grabbed his elbow again. ‘Oh, grow up! Let’s go inside, good-looking, and I’ll let you buy me a drink.’

          He tugged his elbow free.

          ‘Sorry,’ he said, tension lines popping up between his eyes, ‘but I’m not gonna play any fucking power games.’

          ‘What the fuck are you on about?’

          He turned to walk away, throwing, ‘Maybe I’ll come back after eight to see if you’re still here,’ over his retreating shoulder.

          She called out, ‘Oh, boy! You don’t know what a good thing you’re walking away from!’ to his retreating back.

          Nate told himself that he had a good idea of what he’d be missing. She couldn’t be right, he told himself. They can’t all be like that. Can they?

          When he got home he booted up his desktop computer – the smart phone’s little keys and screen and such were too picky for him – and edited his profile on the website by adding, in the who-you’re-looking-for part, right beneath ‘non-smoker’ and ‘non-religious’ and ‘not into cars’: ‘Honesty and Consideration essential. Promptness appreciated.’

          Over the next few days he indicated an interest in a couple of date-seekers’ profiles to no response. Then he received a message from a woman named Lily, who did logistics with a trucking company. He’d seen her profile but hadn’t contacted her because she was only 32. A dozen years didn’t mean that much to her after all, apparently. Exchanging a few bland written messages, they agreed to meet for coffee at the Metropolis – her choice – promptly at three the next afternoon, a Saturday.

          Lily was short and thin and gamine-haired and on time. When he saw her he smiled and said, ‘You’re Lily? I’m Nate.’

          She looked him up and down and said, ‘Well, what d’you expect me to do – strip off my knickers and roll over on my back?’

          Nate had to think about this for a moment. It was obviously a question requiring no answer, as it was clearly not a request for information. Since such gratuitous attacks on his character having been a technique that Sara had often used to bully him, he knew that any response at all would be a bad idea.

          He said, ‘Uh, let’s just go order some coffee, eh?’

          ‘Oooo,’ she said, trembling her fingertips in mock something-or-other. ‘How masterful! Just flat-out telling me what we’re gonna do. I bet you think you’re God’s gift to women, eh? Men!’ Then she smiled.

          That was it, then. She’d sneer out some sarcastic but unfounded character assassination and then let him know with a look that she’s just kidding – caring and sharing, possums; only Dame Edna’s piss-takes had been funny, and they were funny because they were on target and their targets had high profiles. He shrugged without a word and headed for the ordering counter.

          ‘Lead the way, O alpha male,’ Lily sneered, smirking. She did troop along to the counter, though, perky as a person can be.

          The barista, a smiling subcontinental fellow with an unfortunate moustache, bestowed his usual professional greeting on them and cocked a professionally inquisitorial eyebrow.

          Nate nodded toward Lily to indicate deference to her in the order of ordering.

          ‘Ooo!’ she said with overdone sarcasm. ‘He’s gallantly allowing me to order first! What chivalry!’ Then she turned and said directly to Nate, ‘It’s going to take more than that to get into my knickers, mate.’

          The barista smiled blandly and said, also blandly, ‘Your order, please?’

          She looked the barista in the eye and said pleasantly, ‘A cappuccino, please. With chocolate sprinkles. I do adore chocolate, don’t you?’

          ‘Oh, yes. And you, sir?’

          ‘Uh, I’ll have a flat white with soy milk …’

          ‘Soy milk?’ Lily crowed derisively, triumphantly, at operatic volume, her face sparkling with delight at the opportunity to express full-on scorn. ‘SOY milk!’ Her voice this second time even louder and in more of a childhood-bully sing-song.

          For an instant her face morphed in Nate’s mind into Sara’s that time he’d come home from year-12 economics class full of intellectual stimulation and wanting to discuss Keynes with her, since she was at uni and all. ‘Keynes? John Maynard KEYNES!’ as if he’d said the Easter Bunny. Then her face morphed back to being Lily’s grinning visage.

          That did it, right there, but Nate just told the barista, ‘Just one flat white with soy milk, not three.’ He decided not to ask for a shot of Kahlua in it, which he enjoyed, as he reckoned that would have given her added ammunition.

          Lily was oblivious, soaring: ‘Oh, la-di-da! Aren’t you just better than us normal people! Everyday Waikato moo-juice isn’t good enough for you, is that it? Well, if you think you’re going to impress me into bed by ordering hoity-toity pretentious-twat milk you’re sadly mistaken, mate.’

          Ignoring her pointedly, partly to avoid seeing the smirking smile he was certain followed this, he took out his wallet, told the barista, ‘I’ll shout this round, I guess, eh?’ in an ordinary tone of voice and took out his eftpos card.

          Still in crow-loudly mode, Lily sneered, ‘Look at the big spender! What a hunk of hairy masculine traditionalism! Thinks he’s going to wow his way into my knickers by splashing out on a four-fifty cup of cappuccino!’

          Then she smiled her just-kidding smile again, but again Nate didn’t see it. Without turning his head or changing his tone or volume of voice, he told the barista, ‘Make that just for mine. We’ll each pay for our own.’

          The barista nodded and keyed in the sale. Nate swiped his card and keyed in his PIN.

          It took Lily a few moments for this to sink in. ‘Wow! What a cheapskate!’ she huffed. ‘I can’t believe it! You’ll never get into my …’ but Nate had already turned and started to walk back toward the front of the café. Without her intended audience Lily politely and smilingly paid the barista for her cappuccino.

          Confused, conflicted, and somehow serene, Nate almost floated to the front of the café, out the open doors, and to his favourite seat at his favourite footpath table. Lily emerged out of the front door a few moments later, still smiling.

          ‘Well, you’re really fucking considerate,’ she said, her face not quite achieving a look of anger. ‘You might’ve asked me where I wanted to sit, y’know. I don’t like sitting outside.’ She pointed back through the door. ‘There’s a table right there that’s just right, I reckon.’

          ‘Oh, by all means, take it, Lily. You should definitely sit where you want.’

          ‘Well, then, get off your arse and let’s take that table then.’

          ‘No, I’ll stay here.’

          Lily did a double-take. ‘What’s this shit?’

          ‘No, it’s not shit, Lily. You sit where you want to sit and I sit where I want to sit. Simple. Problem solved.’

          ‘Oh yeah – fine date that’d be!’

          ‘Listen, as far as I’m concerned this date ended a few minutes ago, back at the bar.’

          She sat down. Plomp. Right across from him. At the same outside table. ‘What?’

          ‘You went way past my abuse-tolerance level when I was ordering, that’s all.’

          ‘What? You got your knickers in a twist over a bit of good-natured banter? Can’t you take a joke?’

          He smiled. ‘Jokes are funny. You’re not.’

          ‘Here. Let me educate you. I don’t know what goes with you Chinese or whatever it is you are, but we Kiwis enjoy taking a bit of the piss out of each other.’

          He considered her for a moment, and decided that it wasn’t worth it to point out that he was half Japanese, not Chinese – after all, a racist is a racist. If anything he was pleased that her compulsion to be unpleasant had pre-empted her from centring her ice-breaker conversational direction on the shape of his eyes, as had been the case far too often when he first met people. He reckoned that he’d already explained his being a Kiwi named Bierman with epicanthic folds enough times for one lifetime. He also decided not to mention to Lily that he’d been a Kiwi for a dozen years longer than she had. Not worth it at all. He’d never seen her before and with any luck he’d never see her again.

          He decided further that it wasn’t worth mentioning that he’d rather dig a hole in the ground and stick his dick into that than get into her knickers.

          ‘You’d better grab your table before somebody else does,’ is what he ended up saying.

          She looked at him hard before wandering off, muttering something about snowflakes.

          When he got home he edited the bottom of his profile to read, ‘Honesty, Consideration, Respect, and Courtesy essential. Promptness appreciated.’

          A few days later he found a message on his website page from a Wintec business studies tutor named Oli.

          This time he made a point of exchanging a half a dozen messages before making the date. Oli seemed to be intelligent and educated, which was good, and she didn’t seem to be put off by his stressing of honesty, consideration, respect, and courtesy.

          When he asked her if she thought that his doing so was annoying or pretentious she wrote back that it was better than wanting to talk about the size of her tits, or what her preferred sexual practices were, which she claimed had been the focus of others with whom she’d come into contact online.

          Nate figured that this time, maybe, he was heading for an online date that might last the duration of at least one social beverage.

          They met at Good George at six-thirty, more or less on time. Oli was a jolly-looking soul – Jolly Oli – with round, red-apple cheeks, curly blond hair, tastefully feminine clothing that flattered her voluptuous physique without flaunting it, a prominent chin, and a strong, confident smile.

          All was courteous and warmish as they identified themselves and ordered their beers, both commenting on how silly and pretentious the current fad of having to choose from a long list of craft beers was, but agreeing that it was essentially harmless – or would be until the big corporations managed to take it over and run it into the ground. Oli taught marketing.

          So far so good.

          They sat.

          Then Oli leaned forward in a just-between-you-and-me manner and asked, ‘So tell me, Nate – where are you from?’

          Nate groaned inside.

          It was the dreaded ‘from’ question.

          It hadn’t occurred to him to check her out in advance for racism. Shit, she’d seen his photo on his profile page.

          He leaned back in his seat and took a deep breath.

          ‘Since you’ve seen my profile,’ he said slowly, ‘you know that I’m a local boy all the way, so I have to conclude that by “from” you’re referring to the shape of my eyes ...’

          ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, Nate,’ she interrupted hastily, ‘I’m really fond of Asian people. I think you’re all exotically gorgeous!’

          And there it was, slotting him in as an ‘Asian’ person, plus the word ‘all’. He felt the walls of the pigeonhole closing in.

          ‘I’m sorry, but in this context – just meeting a new person, and all that – I’d really strongly prefer not to discuss anything prompted by the shape of my eyes.’

          She gaped at him for a moment.

          ‘Just treat it for now as one of my personal boundaries,’ he smiled. ‘Please respect it.’ He paused, then said hopefully, ‘So tell me, what specific sorts of marketing wisdom did you lay on our future business leaders today?’

          She wasn’t buying it. ‘Okay, just tell me your last name.’

          He felt like telling her, just to vex her, but he didn’t think she’d be buying ‘Bierman’ either, and he took no joy from vexing people – that was Sara shit. ‘I really would appreciate it if you’d respect my preference not to discuss anything that has to do with my ancestry right now.’

          Her smile took on an edge of annoyance. ‘Oh c’mon! Don’t be so bloody precious. Just tell me if you’re Chinese or Japanese or Korean or what. I think that curiosity about that’s reasonable “in this context”, as you put it.’ She allowed her smile to take on a look of self-satisfaction at throwing his words back at him.

          They stared each other down for a few moments.

          Finally Nate gulped down some beer, shrugged sadly, and said, ‘Well, there goes respect, right down the gurgler,’ and shook his head sadly. ‘I wonder which of the others will be next.’

          ‘Respect?’ Oli allowed a hint of outrage into her voice here, but her smile remained confident. ‘What about you respecting my right to get a civil answer to what I think is a reasonable question?’

          She sat back, a gotcha look on her soft, pudgy-cheeked face.

          Nate took a moment to decide that it wasn’t worth the trouble – the conflict – to argue the point; she was an intelligent, educated woman and the hole in her logic should have been obvious to her. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘such stunningly fallacious sophistry certainly does pre-empt any further discussion, doesn’t it?’

          ‘Check and mate,’ she grinned, with a brief victorious fist-pump.

          Assuming an attitude of defeat, he replied, ‘You certainly are a gritty competitor, Oli.’

          ‘I do like winning. So, tell me …’

          ‘I think that you deserve a prize for defeating me in a conversational competition,’ he said.

          ‘Oh, just tell me where you’re from and I’ll forgive you.’

          ‘No. You need a special prize.’ He stood up. ‘And your special prize is that you get to go fuck yourself.’

          That being an exit line if ever there was one, he turned and left.

          He walked north on Victoria Street. He knew that a sample of three was hardly definitive, but it occurred to him that maybe the problem wasn’t with the women, but with him. Maybe he was, in the nasty American pejorative Lily had used, a snowflake. Well, if that’s the way he was, he thought, then that’s the way he was.

          These women, along with Sharon in admin and Toni at the gym and probably every other single woman that he knew, were looking for somebody else, or at least something else, and he had neither the skills nor the desire to be somebody or something else. The first word on his list, after all, was honesty.

          Still, like most people, he supposed, he did crave love, or a reasonable facsimile of it. Warmth. Intimacy. Comfort. Validation. Something like that.

          Bronnie had taught him that it wouldn’t be forever, though. Jan, Lily, and Oli had shown him that the psychological and emotional cost in terms of his concept of integrity was likely to be higher than he was willing to pay.

          It then struck him like a falling brick that he had more than enough money and that monetary cost wasn’t an issue. He kept walking till he reached a well-signposted upstairs brothel in the northern part of Victoria Street.

          He imagined that here everything would be open and honest: money paid; service rendered. He also imagined that if he behaved respectfully and courteously toward the sex worker he hired she’d treat him with respect and courtesy in return. It’d just be good business, after all.

          He’d never been to a brothel before, but he’d watched movies, and thought that if he offered to pay the sex worker a bit extra in advance she might agree not to pretend to like him, or at least not to try to make conversation, thereby putting the kibosh on any potential game playing, plus preventing her from asking the ‘from’ question.

          For conversation he had his old friends on facebook, from time to time, if they weren’t busy, plus the rare invitation to a social event or two, although he often walked away from these with a sour taste in his mind.

          Yes, he believed that he’d find honesty, consideration, respect, and courtesy, as well as warm physical contact with another human being, for a price he could afford at the top of those stairs.

          So up the stairs he went with a pure heart.

  

From 2001 (found in files)

Immigrant P.O.V.

          I have in the past taught a course in American Politics and Government at Waikato University. I was pencilled in to teach it again second semester this year, but the budgetary strangulation currently going on at the uni’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences makes it overwhelmingly unlikely that I’ll actually do it.

          Although a little money always comes in handy (and in the case of contract lecturers the emphasis is more on ‘little’ than ‘money’), this upsets me little.

          First of all, I was always annoyed by the reasons they hired me for the job: I’m a bloke with a couple of appropriate degrees and an American accent. It’s not as if I ever had an academic or research interest in the subject. I’m more into comparative cultural analysis.

          Secondly, having to keep up with what’s happening over there in the Old Country depresses me. I really have neither a strong enough stomach nor a weak enough nose to follow that stuff without experiencing emotional unpleasantness, to put it mildly.

          I’ve had first-hand experience of what those people are like.

          But, never being quite well-off enough to turn down work when offered it, I taught the bloody course.

          Reckoning that most Kiwis know little about the mechanics of how government is structured over there, and that they want to get their money’s worth, I used up more than half the semester going over the arcanely intricate architectural detail of the U.S. Constitution. The rest was devoted to political culture and practice. And, wherever possible, I’d try to inject a heavy dose of cynicism.

          I reckon, though, that I’d drastically reverse the emphasis if it turns out that someday I may have to teach the damned course again.

          Really, all those 18th-century governmental structures are quaint, but they’re only incidental to what is really going on in U.S. politics. And the 18th-century political theories that the whole mess is based on have been stretched so far by now that they’re hardly even incidental.

          For instance, instead of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, I’d emphsise the philosophy of P.T.  Barnum and Walter Dill Scott, whose thinking reveals more about what actually happens in the U.S., and about what could happen here.

          P.T. Barnum, of course, was also a showman, and American politics and government has become another form of mass entertainment, similar to a line-up of sitcoms and soaps. But Barnum also articulated the three maxims that cut to the heart of the American socio-economico-political culture:

          “There’s a sucker born every minute”, “Never give a sucker an even break”, and “You can’t cheat an honest man”.

          Walter Dill Scott was the author of an essay in 1903 called The Psychology of Advertising. Historian David Potter called him “the Archimedes, if not the Nostradamus, of the advertising world.” It was Scott who articulated and promoted the Great Change in American advertising: the selling of the sizzle instead of the steak.

          Keeping the focus firmly off the steak by acting as if only the sizzle matters — creating images while masking reality — has been at the heart of American political practice for a long time, and politicians have keenly adopted each advance in the advertisers’ repertoire of tricks over the years.

          America has been a society of suckers, and the con-men who feed off them, for more than a century and a half, since the days of the traveling snake-oil salesmen and carnival touts in which Barnum operated. Given a slick enough sales pitch, Americans will buy anything. And with enough money involved, the sales pitch is guaranteed enough to be slick.

          And so now we, as well as the Americans, have suffered through several boring waves of adolescents convinced that they must express their individuality by copying other people, and that the way to rebel against the system is to buy things from it.

          We still don’t have a political system where money, and the  images it can buy, is all that matters. Things seemed to be going that way for a few years there, but the movement in that direction seems to have lost momentum. New Zealanders, it seems, may not be quite the suckers that the Americans are.

          I hope I won’t have to add: “yet.” 

Crunchy Stuff

Crunchy Stuff

So, William, I guess we should start by asking you to tell us how all this began.

          Oh God, as far back as I can remember – maybe when I was about four or five.

Go on …

          Well, I was trying to teach myself how to ride a bike – y’know, my dad was too busy and nobody else gave a shit – and of course I skinned a knee. My mother was more than a bit grouchy about having to wash it and tape a gauze pad over it.

          She gave me a whole lot of shit about me being careless and causing her so much trouble. She even accused me of skinning my knee on purpose just to cause her aggravation – actually made me deny that one, tearfully, a few times.

          Then she loomed over me and in one of her more ominous and threatening voices commanded me to leave the injury alone – not to touch it no matter what, and especially not to pick at it, or it could get infected and I’d lose my leg.

          Figures of speech can play merry hell with a small child’s imagination. I wondered where I should look for it if it got lost – under the couch or something?

          Anyway, by the next day or so it’d stopped hurting and started itching. My mother took the gauze pad off so the wound – she referred to my skinned knee as a wound – so the wound could get some air, revealing a couple of interesting-looking scabs, which my mother, amping up the ferocity of her threats, forbade me once again to pick at. 

          I waited until she was well out of sight before exploring those wonderful scabs with my fingertips and picking at them with my little-kid-dirty fingernails.

          Much of my childhood is kinda hazy in my memory, y’know – I was just five years old; how much do you remember from that age? – but these things are as sharp in my mind as if they’d just been this morning.

          It was wonderful. It was the best.

In what way?

          Well, the actual tactile sensations aren’t any mystery. There’s that millisecond of resistance, and then the sublime crunchy sensation of the of them crumbling up into a bunch of hard little grains of dried blood. Gritty powder to rub between the fingerprint parts of my thumb and forefinger. Either hand. It establishes some kind of neural circuit between my fingertips and the deepest part of my brain, the part that’s the real me.

          Crunch!

          Of course, sometimes parts of larger scabs are so thick or old or something that they actually bend and then kinda snap, not quite like

cleaving a diamond, before getting crunchy.

Sort of like bubble wrap?

          Yeah, I know that some people feel strongly about popping bubble wrap, which I agree does have its benefits, but it’s not the same thing. Popping whiteheads is better, as it produces that split-second painlike sensation, but it’s still not as wonderful as dried-blood scabs. Anyway, I never had acne, and I can count the number of poppable zits I’ve had in my life on the fingers of both hands.

          One of my zits, though – one of them was magic. It was when I was in my early twenties, and came from an ingrown beard hair a centimetre or so below my lower lip. It bled a bit when I popped it, so I let the whole shebang dry clinging to an adjacent beard hair. When it was good and hard to my touch I slid it carefully down its hair and away from my face. It was this gorgeous golden colour, hard and irregular and a bit jagged, and it crunched magnificently!

          The best thing, though, was that when I pulled it away a bit more pus and blood oozed out, and I scratched the spot just enough to produce another doozy. I kept picking that spot and getting increasingly smaller, but still satisfactory, results for a month.

          It was good.

          But that was more than twenty years ago.

Back to your fascination’s early years, then.

          Oh, yes. Yes.

          Well, after that first skinned knee I took lots of risks when I was playing so that I’d have plenty of scabs to play with. I knew, intuitively I guess, that it was best to keep this interest away from my mother’s attention. She bitched enough about having to patch me up, when it got that bad. The thing was that she did have a nasty urge to control me, but she was so self-absorbed that she paid me little attention, only slipping into control mode from time to time – like when she actually noticed me.

          The next winter we had gas heat installed, and whatever it is that gas heaters do to the air dried out my lips, especially early in the morning when I was waking up, so they’d eventually split from top to bottom with a Pop! accompanied by a split-second jab of mild pain – which was a treat in itself.

          I’d press a dozen or so different places on the back of my hand against where my lip was split so that it looked as if it was covered with a red pox of some kind. This amused me. Or else I’d press the same place against the slit repeatedly until I had a dryable, and subsequently crunchable wad of blood.

          Scolding me all the while, my mother kept putting horrible-tasting ointments on my split lips, which I always wiped off as soon as her attention focused elsewhere.

          Then it occurred to me – I can’t explain why – that it might be rewarding to puncture my dry lips here and there with a pin, so I nicked a couple of pins from my mother’s sewing box. I don’t know how the idea got into my five-or-six-year-old mind, but I knew that I’d better sterilise the pinpoints before breaking my skin with them, so I held them into the flame of my father’s cigarette lighter when nobody was looking, figuring that would do the trick.

          It was good, that millisecond when my labial epidermis gave way to the pin point. Pop!

          Of course my mother noticed the little holes in my lips, so she burst in on me when I was standing on my little box in front of the bathroom sink, looking into the mirror as I was puncturing my lower lip. She put on a big show of outrage, of course, and dismissed my reassurance that I’d sterilised the pin point.

          ‘Do you know what you are, Wili?’ That’s how she spelt my nickname. ‘You’re – you’re – you’re a masochist!’ Her tone was highly accusatory, naturally, as well as angry.

          Now, being only five or six, I had no fucking idea what a masochist is, but she made it plain that it’s something really bad, something that really pissed her off, something that meant that I’d best take pains, if you’ll forgive the pun, to avoid letting her catch me poking holes in my lips thereafter.

          When I got older and found out what a masochist actually is, by the way, I realised that I’m not one at all. For one thing, I don’t want any person other than myself causing me any pain at all. Can’t stand it and won’t put up with it. Pain does nothing for me sexually, either, and the little bit of pain from split lips is about all that I can take, anyhow.

          Then, when I was about seven I guess, I discovered that my ears were better for my pinwork than my lips. Just a tiny prick with the pin on the inside part of my ear, near the hole leading into my middle ear – I could hardly feel it at all – would bring up just a small bubble of blood, and if I could discipline myself not to pick at it until it was good and dry, I could crunch it right where it was, and the sound so close to my aural opening, followed by crunching it down into tiny grains that I could rub back and forth along my outer ear’s channel, well ...

          It was good.

So, when did you start to escalate?

          It was after my marriage collapsed. I’d be enjoying my private vice of crunching my dried blood for about 20 years, I guess. I’d given up on pins after a few years – before I made puberty, it was – but had discovered the wonderful possibilities that fingernails offered, especially when scratched against the inside of my ear or my scalp.

          Anyway, I was driving through the park one morning just before dawn – it doesn’t matter why – and accidentally ran over a duck that had waddled right in front of my car in the dim light. I thought, Hey, I bet that duck’s just chock full of dryable blood, so I stopped the car and wrapped the dead quacker in a towel and took it home.

          The duck blood was, well, disappointing, probably because it took me too long to get it home and the surfaces that it dried on weren’t quite right. There certainly was a lot of it, though, and I began to wonder about the possibilities.

          After thinking the problem about halfway through I went to an op shop and bought a cheap wall mirror, which I lay flat on a table in my spare room. I had plenty of spare room after my wife moved out. I did some googling and then went to the high-priced free-range-high-animal-welfare butchery in the little cluster of shops by the roundabout. Right across from the local Pizza Hut.

          I asked the perhaps overly friendly butcher for two litres of pig blood, explaining perhaps unnecessarily that I wanted to try to make black pudding. That was how much the online recipe had called for. He didn’t have any in stock, of course, but said if I’d give him some contact details he’d get some in and contact me.

          I don’t know why, maybe a reaction to some deeply buried childhood trauma, but this made me feel really threatened.

Understandable.

          Anyway, I gave him a phony name and my mobile-phone number, and in due course he called me and I went and bought it. He sold it to me in one of those zip-lock plastic bags. A fairly big one.

          It was okay, but it really didn’t hit that part of me – I call it my ‘soul’, which I know is a ridiculous word – that came alive from crunching my own blood. Crushing the pig’s blood against the mirror was indeed a whole lot of fun, especially if I timed it at the right point in the coagulation process, but that’s all. Pouring some of the pig blood onto my skin, when I had the time to let it dry without going out into public, was much better, and objectively just about as good as one of my own scabs, but its, well, spiritual effect was faint and ephemeral. I’m sure all this was in my mind, though …

But?

          Yeah, I suppose the whole obsession was overwhelmingly more psychological than tactile or aesthetic.

You recognise this?

          Of course, but that doesn’t make any difference.

No, it wouldn’t.

          So there I was. Back to scratching scabs into my scalp and picking at them. Barely staying alive, y’know? And then I got an email from my finally-elderly mother announcing that she was flying here to visit me, and letting me know what her demands would be, and that I was not to assert any resistance to her demands once she got here, and well, you know …

I think that’s all I need from you for my background report. Wait here and D.I. Lotofuatiaifo will take the rest of your statement.

The #metoo Thing

The #metoo Thing

          The reportedly widespread confusion amongst men in developed societies about how to react to the #metoo phenomenon is understandable. Massive numbers of us seem to be fearful, trepidatious, or defiant about the likelihood of our own behaviour coming into scrutiny and being publicly denounced. However, maybe a closer examination of what’s involved might help to dispel some of the ambiguity involved in our situations.

          Most of us, of course, have been sexual assholes at times. Avoiding assholery completely would be an extraordinary achievement, considering the acculturation and socialisation we have undergone, along with our all-too-human lack of perfection.

          I myself have been an asshole in regard to sex for what I consider to be a regrettable number of times, although my forays into physically indefensible behaviour occurred when I was much younger, and I have confined my sexually insensitive assholery for the past half a century or so to misusing my inner need to come up with punchlines, or to be humorous in general, by uttering stupid, perhaps hurtful, and definitely unfunny things that have sprung from deep within my underlying acculturation; although inexcusable and indefensible, these have been one-offs followed by instant regret, and I’ve abandoned them once I’ve realised that I’ve fucked up.

          Anyway, so far so good about me being #metoo’d for any of my past indiscretions, whether I deserve the shame or not.

          Perhaps there’s a reason for this, other than just luck. Maybe several.

          It seems to me, and of course I could be wrong, that what tends to graduate – or perhaps that’s the wrong word – regrettable but forgettable assholery into #metoo status worthy of public shaming is the involvement of aggression, domination, power exploitation, or all of these.

          Aggression, or acting on feelings of generalised and violent hostility and destructiveness, is part of our genetic heritage, resulting to some degree from testosterone levels, which means that men tend to be more likely to have strong aggressive impulses than women, although women also produce testosterone, usually in smaller amounts, and can also experience and express terrifyingly aggressive urges. My mother was like that.

          As with many hormonal reactions, such as fight-or-flight response, that we acquired thousands of years before the emergence of civil society, we can channel aggression in a variety of ways. Some of them are adaptive to our current environments, such as excelling at sport, general competitiveness, and swearing at drivers who almost kill us, whilst others are maladaptive, sexual aggression justifying #metoo denunciations being one of them.

          Overbearingly aggressive people strive to be dominant and masterful and are continuously on the alert for opportunities to confront and attack those people they identify as appropriate targets, with the goal of harming them, dominating them, or both. For a whole shitload of perpetrators of sexual aggression qualifying as #metoo behaviour, but certainly not all of them, women seem to be appropriate targets.

          Instead of merely being ordinary people who occasionally slip up and act like assholes, these dedicated aggressors become utter assholes. It’s who they are. They can hardly imagine a life devoid of the joy they experience from engaging in sexual assaults of the #metoo variety.

          The other factors that qualify assholery behaviour as #metoo sexual assault, dominance and power exploitation, are of course closely linked to aggression. Political power, whether it’s the politics of a country, an industry, an organisation, a workplace, a family, or a relationship – and politics is an inevitable part of these and all other areas of human interaction – refers to the ability to influence or control the behaviour or thinking of others.

          Although power imbalances are omnipresent, they only lead to #metoo sexual aggression when undiluted assholes exploit them for that purpose to prove their superiority to themselves. The prevalence of this exploitation results from toxic assholes’ compulsive need to seek positions of dominant power, and ruthlessly, and to abuse it: Weinstein, Trump, British Cabinet ministers, your sister’s boss, and on and on.

          Rape and sexual assault therefore seem to me to be crimes of out-of-control aggression expressing the rapists’ inner craving for dominance, albeit acted out through sexuality. Of course, one sweeping general statement about as multi-headed a monster as sexual assault is bound to be only partially true, but the combination of toxic aggressiveness and the assertion and abuse of power in order to dominate usually seems to be a major factor in the assaults we tend to consider worthy of shaming.

          My own #metoo experience illustrates this.

          It was in 1958. I was 12 years old. My brother was 14. He’d mercilessly and joyfully bullied, tormented, belittled, taunted, humiliated, teased viciously, and otherwise dominated and abused me on an almost daily basis for as far back as I could remember.

          He somehow inveigled me into his room in our recently built three-bedroom house. Whilst telling jokes about how funny cocksucking is, he physically restrained me, dropped his pants, and with one hand on the back of my neck started forcing my face down toward his genitals, joking about it all the while. The smell wafting up from his sweaty crotch was vile. He forced me as far as my lips barely touching the end of his erect penis before I was able to fight my way free. I don’t know how. I fled to my room to the sound of his mocking laughter.

          To the best of my memory, neither of us ever mentioned the incident to the other thereafter. I certainly never mentioned it to anyone at the time. It would’ve been my word against his. No witnesses.

          Thirty-two years later family pressure forced me to meet him again after avoiding him for several years, even establishing residence in another country to do so. He was even more aggressive and dominance-oriented than he’d been as a child and adolescent, and apparently found it amusing to flaunt his love for bigotry in all its forms in my face. At one point he criticised my adopted home of New Zealand for having recently decriminalised homosexuality, giggling at me as he vividly advocated genocide against homosexuals. I didn’t mention his attempting to rape me back when, as my children and I were staying in his house and had nowhere else to go. Power.

          I knew he’d done it to dominate and harm me, anyway, not out of homosexual attraction. Yuh reckon?

          #metoo